Garden-Craft Old and New
by John Dando Sedding · English · Gutenberg #38829 · 387,606 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Garden-Craft Old and New
Author: John Dando Sedding
Contributor: E. F. Russell
Release date: February 11, 2012 [eBook #38829]
Most recently updated: January 8, 2021
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GARDEN-CRAFT OLD AND NEW ***
Produced by Chris Curnow, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
GARDEN-CRAFT
OLD AND NEW
BY THE LATE
JOHN D. SEDDING
WITH MEMORIAL NOTICE BY THE
REV. E. F. RUSSELL
_WITH NINE ILLUSTRATIONS_
NEW EDITION
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUeBNER & CO., LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1895
[Illustration: A GARDEN ENCLOSED.]
PREFACE.
"_What am I to say for my book?" asks Mr Stevenson in the Preface to "An
Inland Voyage." "Caleb and Joshua brought back from Palestine a
formidable bunch of grapes; alas! my book produces naught so nourishing;
and, for the matter of that, we live in an age when people prefer a
definition to any quantity of fruit._"
_As this apology is so uncalled for in the case of this fruitful little
volume, I would venture to purloin it, and apply it where it is wholly
suitable. Here, the critic will say, is an architect who makes gardens
for the houses he builds, writing upon his proper craft, pandering to
that popular preference for a definition of which Mr Stevenson speaks,
by offering descriptions of what he thinks a fine garden should be,
instead of useful figured plans of its beauties!_
_And yet, to tell truth, it is more my subject than myself that is to
blame if my book be unpractical. Once upon a time complete in itself, as
a brief treatise upon the technics of gardening delivered to my brethren
of the Art-worker's Guild a year ago, the essay had no sooner arrived
with me at home, than it fell to pieces, lost gravity and compactness,
and became a garden-plaything--a sort of gardener's "open letter," to
take loose pages as fancies occurred. So have these errant thoughts,
jotted down in the broken leisure of a busy life, grown solid unawares
and expanded into a would-be-serious contribution to garden-literature._
_Following upon the original lines of the Essay on the For and Against
of Modern Gardening, I became the more confirmed as to the general
rightness of the old ways of applying Art, and of interpreting Nature
the more I studied old gardens and the point of view of their makers;
until I now appear as advocate of old types of design, which, I am
persuaded, are more consonant with the traditions of English life, and
more suitable to an English homestead than some now in vogue._
_The old-fashioned garden, whatever its failings in the eyes of the
modern landscape-gardener (great is the poverty of his invention),
represents one of the pleasures of England, one of the charms of that
quiet beautiful life of bygone times that I, for one, would fain see
revived. And judged even as pieces of handicraft, apart from their
poetic interest, these gardens are worthy of careful study. They embody
ideas of ancient worth; they evidence fine aims and heroic efforts; they
exemplify traditions that are the net result of a long probation. Better
still, they render into tangible shapes old moods of mind that English
landscape has inspired; they testify to old devotion to the scenery of
our native land, and illustrate old attempts to idealise its pleasant
traits._
_Because the old gardens are what they are--beautiful yesterday,
beautiful to-day, and beautiful always--we do well to turn to them, not
to copy their exact lines, nor to limit ourselves to the range of their
ornament and effects, but to glean hints for our garden-enterprise
to-day, to drink of their spirit, to gain impulsion from them. As often
as not, the forgotten field proves the richest of pastures._
_J. D. S._
THE CROFT, WEST WICKHAM, KENT,
_Oct. 8, 1890_.
MEMOIR.
The Manuscript of this book was placed complete in the hands of his
publishers by John Sedding. He did not live to see its production.
At the wish of his family and friends, I have, with help from others,
set down some memories and impressions of my friend.
My acquaintance with John Sedding dates from the year 1875. He was then
37 years of age, and had been practising as an architect almost
exclusively in the South-West of England. The foundations of this
practice were laid by his equally talented brother, Edmund Sedding, who,
like himself, had received his training in the office of Mr Street.
Edmund died in 1868, and John took up the business, but his clients were
so few, and the prospect of an increase in their number so little
encouraging, that he left Bristol and came to London, and here I first
met him. He had just taken a house in Charlotte Street, Bedford Square,
and the house served him on starting both for home and office.
The first years in London proved no exception to the rule of first
years, they were more or less a time of struggle and anxiety. John
Sedding's happy, buoyant nature, his joy in his art, and invincible
faith in his mission, did much to carry him through all difficulties.
But both at this time, and all through his life, he owed much, very
much, to the brave hopefulness and wise love of his wife. Rose Sedding,
a daughter of Canon Tinling, of Gloucester, lives in the memory of those
who knew her as an impersonation of singular spiritual beauty and
sweetness. Gentle and refined, sensitive and sympathetic to an unusual
degree, there was no lack in her of the sterner stuff of
character--force, courage, and endurance. John Sedding leaned upon his
wife; indeed, I cannot think of him without her, or guess how much of
his success is due to what she was to him. Two days before his death he
said to me, "I have to thank God for the happiest of homes, and the
sweetest of wives."
Many will remember with gratitude the little home in Charlotte Street,
as the scene of some of the pleasantest and most refreshing hours they
have ever known. John Sedding had the gift of attracting young men,
artists and others, to himself, and of entering speedily into the
friendliest relations with them. He met them with such taking frankness,
such unaffected warmth of welcome, that they surrendered to him at once,
and were at once at ease with him and happy.
On Sundays, when the religious duties of the day were over, he was wont
to gather a certain number of these young fellows to spend the evening
at his house. No one of those who were privileged to be of the party can
forget the charming hospitality of these evenings. The apparatus was so
simple, the result so delightful; an entire absence of display, and yet
no element of perfect entertainment wanting. On these occasions, when
supper was over, Mrs Sedding usually played for us with great
discernment and feeling the difficult music of Beethoven, Grieg, Chopin,
and others, and sometimes she sang. More than one friendship among their
guests grew out of these happy evenings.
In course of time the increase of his family and the concurrent increase
of his practice obliged him to remove, first his office to Oxford
Street, and later on his home to the larger, purer air of a country
house in the little village of West Wickham, Kent. This house he
continued to occupy until his death. Work of all kinds now began to flow
in upon him, not rapidly, but by steady increase. His rich faculty of
invention, his wide knowledge, his skill in the manipulation of natural
forms, the fine quality of his taste, were becoming more and more known.
He produced in large numbers designs for wall-papers, for decoration,
and for embroidery. These designs were never repetitions of old
examples, nor were they a rechauffe of his own previous work. Something
of his soul he put into all that he undertook, hence his work was never
commonplace, and scarcely needed signature to be known as his, so
unmistakably did it bear his stamp, the "marque de fabrique," of his
individuality.
I have known few men so well able as he to press flowers into all manner
of decorative service, in metal, wood, stone or panel, and in
needlework. He understood them, and could handle them with perfect ease
and freedom, each flower in his design seeming to fall naturally into
its appointed place. Without transgressing the natural limits of the
material employed, he yet never failed to give to each its own essential
characteristics, its gesture, and its style. Flowers were indeed
passionately loved, and most reverently, patiently studied by him. He
would spend many hours out of his summer holiday in making careful
studies of a single plant, or spray of foliage, painting them, as Mr
Ruskin had taught him, in siena and white, or in violet-carmine and
white. Leaves and flowers were, in fact, almost his only school of
decorative design.
This is not the place to attempt any formal exposition of John Sedding's
views on Art and the aims of Art. They can be found distinctly stated
and amply, often brilliantly, illustrated in his Lectures and Addresses,
of which some have appeared in the architectural papers and some are
still in manuscript.[1] But short of this formal statement, it may prove
not uninteresting to note some characters of his work which impressed
us.
[Footnote 1: It is much to be wished that these Lectures and Addresses
should be collected and published.]
Following no systematic order, we note first his profound sympathy with
ancient work, and with ancient work of all periods that might be called
periods of living Art. He never lost an opportunity of visiting and
intently studying ancient buildings, sketching them, and measuring them
with extraordinary care, minuteness, and patience. "On one occasion,"
writes Mr Lethaby, "when we were hurried he said, 'We cannot go, it is
life to us.'" A long array of sketch-books, crowded with studies and
memoranda, remains to bear witness to his industry. In spite of this
extensive knowledge, and copious record of old work, he never literally
reproduced it. The unacknowledged plagiarisms of Art were in his
judgment as dishonest as plagiarisms in literature, and as hopelessly
dead. "He used old forms," writes Mr Longden, "in a plastic way, and
moulded them to his requirements, never exactly reproducing the old
work, which he loved to draw and study, but making it his starting-point
for new developments. This caused great difference of opinion as to the
merit of his work, very able and skilful judges who look at style from
the traditional point of view being displeased by his designs, while
others who may be said to partake more of the movement of the time,
admired his work."
His latest and most important work, the Church of the Holy Trinity,
Sloane Street, is a case in point. It has drawn out the most completely
opposed judgments from by no means incompetent men; denounced by some,
it has won the warmest praise from others, as, for instance, from two
men who stand in the very front rank of those who excel, William Morris
has said of it, "It is on the whole the best modern interior of a town
church"; and the eminent painter, E. Burnes-Jones, writing to John
Sedding, writes: "I cannot tell you how I admire it, and how I longed to
be at it." Speaking further of this sympathy with old work, Mr Longden,
who knew him intimately, and worked much with him, writes, "The rather
rude character of the Cornish granite work in the churches did not repel
him, indeed, he said he loved it, because he understood it. He has made
additions to churches in Cornwall, such as it may well be imagined the
old Cornishmen would have done, yet with an indescribable touch of
modernness about them. He also felt at home with the peculiar character
of the Devonshire work, and some of his last work is in village churches
where he has made a rather ordinary church quite beautiful and
interesting, by repairing and extending old wooden screens, putting in
wooden seats, with an endless variety of symbolic designs, marble font
and floor, fine metal work, simple but well-designed stained glass, good
painting in a reredos, all, as must be with an artist, adding to the
general effect, and falling into place in that general effect, while
each part is found beautiful and interesting, if examined in detail."
"The rich Somersetshire work, where the fine stone lends itself to
elaborate carving, was very sympathetic to Sedding, and he has added to
and repaired many churches in that county, always taking the fine points
in the old work and bringing them out by his own additions, whether in
the interior or the exterior, seizing upon any peculiarity of site or
position to show the building to the best advantage, and never
forgetting the use of a church, but increasing the convenience of the
arrangements for worship, and emphasizing the sacred character of the
buildings on which he worked."
In his lectures to Art students, no plea was more often on his lips than
the plea for living Art, as contrasted with "shop" Art, or mere
antiquarianism. The artist is the product of his own time and of his own
country, his nature comes to him out of the past, and is nourished in
part upon the past, but he lives in the present, and of the present,
sharing its spirit and its culture. John Sedding had great faith in the
existence of this art gift, as living and active in his own time, he
recognised it reverently and humbly in himself, and looked for it and
hailed it with joy and generous appreciation in others. Hence the value
he set upon association among Art workers. "Les gens d'esprit," says M.
Taine, speaking of Art in Italy, "n'ont jamais plus d'esprit que
lorsqu'ils sont ensemble. Pour avoir des oeuvres d'art il faut d'abord
des artistes, mais aussi des ateliers. Alors il y avait des ateliers, et
en outre les artistes faisaient des corporations. Tous se tenaient, et
dans la grande societe, de petites societes unissaient etroitement et
librement leurs membres. La familiarite les rapprochait; la rivalite les
aiguillonnait."[2]
[Footnote 2: _Philosophie de l'art en Italie_ (p. 162).--H. TAINE.]
He gave practical effect to these views in the conduct of his own
office, which was as totally unlike the regulation architect's office,
as life is unlike clockwork.
Here is a charming "interior" from the pen of his able chief assistant
and present successor, Mr H. Wilson:--
"I shall not readily forget my first impressions of Mr Sedding. I was
introduced to him at one of those delightful meetings of the Art
Workers' Guild, and his kindly reception of me, his outstretched hand,
and the unconscious backward impulses of his head, displaying the
peculiar whiteness of the skin over the prominent temporal and frontal
bones, the playful gleam of his eyes as he welcomed me, are things that
will remain with me as long as memory lasts.
"Soon after that meeting I entered his office, only to find that he was
just as delightful at work as in the world.
"The peculiar half shy yet eager way in which he rushed into the front
room, with a smile and a nod of recognition for each of us, always
struck me. But until he got to work he always seemed preoccupied, as if
while apparently engaged in earnest discussion of some matter an
under-current of thought was running the while, and as if he were
devising something wherewith to beautify his work even when arranging
business affairs.
"This certainly must have been the case, for frequently he broke off in
the midst of his talk to turn to a board and sketch out some design, or
to alter a detail he had sketched the day before with a few vigorous
pencil-strokes. This done, he would return to business, only to glance
off again to some other drawing, and to complete what would not _come_
the day before. In fact he was exactly like a bird hopping from twig to
twig, and from flower to flower, as he hovered over the many drawings
which were his daily work, settling here a form and there a moulding as
the impulse of the moment seized him.
"And though at times we were puzzled to account for, or to anticipate
his ways, and though the work was often hindered by them, we would not
have had it otherwise.
"Those 'gentillesses d'oiseaux,' as Hugo says, those little birdy ways,
so charming from their unexpectedness, kept us constantly on the alert,
for we never quite knew what he would do next. It was not his custom to
move in beaten tracks, and his everyday life was as much out of the
common as his inner life. His ways with each of us were marked by an
almost womanly tenderness. He seemed to regard us as his children, and
to have a parent's intuition of our troubles, and of the special needs
of each with reference to artistic development.
"He would come, and taking possession of our stools would draw with his
left arm round us, chatting cheerily, and yet erasing, designing
vigorously meanwhile. Then, with his head on one side like a jackdaw
earnestly regarding something which did not quite please him, he would
look at the drawing a moment, and pounce on the paper, rub all his work
out, and begin again. His criticism of his own work was singularly frank
and outspoken even to us. I remember once when there had been a slight
disagreement between us, I wrote to him to explain. Next morning, when
he entered the office, he came straight to the desk where I was working,
quietly put his arm round me, took my free hand with his and pressed it
and myself to him without a word. It was more than enough.
"He was, however, not one of those who treat all alike. He adapted
himself with singular facility to each one with whom he came in contact;
his insight in this respect was very remarkable, and in consequence he
was loved and admired by the most diverse natures. The expression of his
face was at all times pleasant but strangely varied, like a lake it
revealed every passing breath of emotion in the most wonderful way,
easily ruffled and easily calmed.
"His eyes were very bright and expressive, with long lashes, the upper
lids large, full, and almost translucent, and his whole face at anything
which pleased him lit up and became truly radiant. At such times his
animation in voice, gesture, and look was quite remarkable, his talk was
full of felicitous phrases, happy hits, and piquant sayings.
"His was the most childlike nature I have yet seen, taking pleasure in
the simplest things, ever ready for fun, trustful, impulsive, and
joyous, yet easily cast down. His memory for details and things he had
seen and sketched was marvellous, and he could turn to any one of his
many sketches and find a tiny scribble made twenty or thirty years ago,
as easily as if he had made it yesterday.
"His favourite attitude in the office was with his back to the fireplace
and with his hands behind him, head thrown back, looking at, or rather
through one. He seldom seemed to look at anyone or anything, his glance
always had something of divination in it, and in his sketches, however
slight, the soul of the thing was always seized, and the accidental or
unnecessary details left to others less gifted to concern themselves
with.
"His love of symbolism was only equalled by his genius for it, old ideas
had new meanings for him, old symbols were invested with deeper
significance and new ones full of grace and beauty discovered. In this
his intense, enthusiastic love of nature and natural things stood him in
good stead, and he used Nature as the old men did, to teach new truths.
For him as well as for all true artists, the universe was the living
visible garment of God, the thin glittering rainbow-coloured veil which
hides the actual from our eyes. He was the living embodiment of all that
an architect should be, he had the sacred fire of enthusiasm within, and
he had the power of communicating that fire to others, so that workmen,
masons, carvers could do, and did lovingly for him, what they would not
or could not do for others. We all felt and still feel that it was his
example and precept that has given us what little true knowledge and
right feeling for Art we may possess, and the pity is there will never
be his like again.
"He was not one of those who needed to pray 'Lord, keep my memory
green,' though that phrase was often on his lips, as well as another
delightful old epitaph:
'Bonys emonge stonys lys ful steyl
Quilst the soules wanderis where that God will.'"[3]
[Footnote 3: In Thornhill Church.]
This delightful and assuredly entirely faithful picture is in itself
evidence of the contagion of John Sedding's enthusiasm.
Beyond the inner circle of his own office, he sought and welcomed the
unfettered co-operation of other artists in his work; in the words of a
young sculptor, "he gave us a chance." He let them say their say instead
of binding them to repeat his own. God had His message to deliver by
them, and he made way that the world might hear it straight from their
lips.
The same idea of sympathetic association, "fraternite
genereuse--confiance mutuelle--communaute de sympathies et
d'aspirations," has found embodiment in the Art Workers' Guild, a
society in which artists and craftsmen of all the Arts meet and
associate on common ground. John Sedding was one of the original members
of this Guild, and its second Master.
Of his connection with the Guild the Secretary writes: "No member was
ever more respected, none had more influence, no truer artist existed in
the Guild." And Mr Walter Crane: "His untiring devotion to the Guild
throughout his term of office, and his tact and temper, were beyond
praise."
It must not be inferred from these facts that John Sedding's sympathies
were only for the world of Art, art-workers, and art-ideals. He shared
to the full the ardour of his Socialist friends, in their aspirations
for that new order of more just distribution of all that makes for the
happiness of men, the coming "city which hath foundations whose builder
and maker is God." He did not share their confidence in their methods,
but he honoured their noble humanity, and followed their movements with
interest and respect, giving what help he could. The condition of the
poor, especially the London poor, touched him to the quick sometimes
with indignation at their wrongs, sometimes with deep compassion and
humbled admiration at the pathetic patience with which they bore the
burden of their joyless, suffering lives. His own happy constitution and
experience never led him to adopt the cheap optimism with which so many
of us cheat our conscience, and justify to ourselves our own selfish
inertness. The more ample income of his last years made no difference in
the simple ordering of his household, it did make difference in his
charities. He gave money, and what is better, gave his personal labour
to many works for the good of others, some of which he himself had
inaugurated.
John Sedding was an artist by a necessity of his nature. God made him
so, and he could not but exercise his gift, but apart from the
satisfaction that comes by doing what we are meant for, it filled him
with thankfulness to have been born to a craft with ends so noble as are
the ends of Art. To give pleasure and to educate are aims good indeed to
be bound by, especially when by education we understand, not
mind-stuffing, but mind-training, in this case the training of faculty
to discern and be moved by the poetry, the spiritual suggestiveness of
common everyday life. This brought his calling into touch with working
folk.
As a man, John Sedding impressed us all by the singular and beautiful
simplicity and childlikeness of his character, a childlikeness which
never varied, and nothing, not even the popularity and homage which at
last surrounded him, seemed able to spoil it. He never lost his boyish
spontaneity and frankness, the unrestrained brightness of his manners
and address, his boyish love of fun, and hearty, ringing laugh. Mr
Walter Crane speaks of his "indomitable gaiety and spirits which kept
all going, especially in our country outings." "He always led the fun,"
writes Mr Lethaby, "at one time at the head of a side at 'tug of war,'
at another, the winner in an 'egg and spoon race.'" His very faults were
the faults of childhood, the impulsiveness, the quick and unreflecting
resentment against wrong, and the vehement denunciation of it. He
trusted his instincts far more than his reason, and on the whole, his
instincts served him right well, yet at times they failed him, as in
truth they fail us all. There were occasions when a little reflection
would have led him to see that his first rapid impressions were at
fault, and so have spared himself and others some pain and
misunderstanding. Let a thing appear to him false, unfair, or cowardly,
he would lower his lance and dash full tilt at it at once, sometimes to
our admiration, sometimes to our amusement when the appearance proved
but a windmill in the mist, sometimes to our dismay when--a rare
case--he mistook friend for foe.
No picture of John Sedding could be considered at all to represent him
which failed to express the blameless purity of his character and
conduct. I do not think the man lives who ever heard a tainted word from
his lips. There was in him such depth and strength of moral
wholesomeness that he sickened at, and revolted against the unseemly
jest, and still more against the scenes, and experiences of the sensuous
(to use no stronger word) upon which in the minds of some, the artist
must perforce feed his gift. With his whole soul he repudiated the idea
that Art grew only as a flower upon the grave of virtue, and that
artists could, or desired to, lay claim to larger moral licence than
other less imaginative men.
I have kept till last the best and deepest that was in him, the hidden
root of all he was, the hallowing of all he did. I mean his piety--his
deep, unfeigned piety. In his address at the annual meeting of the
Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, a singularly outspoken and
vigorous exhortation to laymen to keep their practice abreast of their
faith, he used the following words: "In the wild scene of 19th century
work, and thought, and passion, when old snares still have their old
witchery, and new depths of wickedness yawn at our feet, when the world
is so wondrous kind to tired souls, and neuralgic bodies, and itself
pleads for concessions to acknowledged weakness; when unfaith is so like
faith, and the devil freely suffers easy acquiescence in high gospel
truth, and even holds a magnifying-glass that one may better see the
sweetness of the life of the 'Son of Man,' it is well in these days of
sloth, and sin, and doubt, to have one's energies braced by a 'girdle of
God' about one's loins! It is well, I say, for a man to have a circle of
religious exercises that can so hedge him about, so get behind his life,
and wind themselves by long familiarity into his character that they
become part of his everyday existence--bone of his bone."
Out of his own real knowledge and practice he spoke these words. The
"circle of religious exercise," the girdle of God, had become for him
part of his everyday existence. I can think of no better words to
express the unwavering consistency of his life. It is no part of my duty
to tell in detail what and how much he did, and with what
whole-heartedness he did it.
Turning to outward things, every associate of John Sedding knew his
enthusiasm for the cause of the Catholic revival in the English Church.
It supplied him with a religion for his whole nature. No trouble seemed
too great on behalf of it, though often his zeal entailed upon him some
material disadvantage. Again and again I have known him give up precious
hours and even days in unremunerated work, to help some struggling
church or mission, or some poor religious community. It was a joy to him
to contribute anything to the beauty of the sanctuary or the solemnity
of its offices. From the year 1878 to 1881 he was sidesman, from 1882 to
1889 churchwarden of St. Alban's, Holborn, doing his work thoroughly,
and with conspicuous kindliness and courtesy. It was one of the thorns
to the rose of his new life in the country that it obliged him to
discontinue this office. For eleven years he played the organ on Sunday
afternoons for a service for young men and maidens, few of whom can
forget the extraordinary life and pathos that he was wont by some magic
to put into his accompaniment to their singing.
This present year, 1891, opened full of promise for John Sedding. In a
marvellously short time he had come hand over hand into public notice
and public esteem, as a man from whom excellent things were to be
expected,--things interesting, original, and beautiful. Mr Burne Jones
writes: "My information about Sedding's work is very slight,--my
interest in him very great, and my admiration too, from the little I had
seen. I know only the church in Sloane Street, but that was enough to
fill me with the greatest hope about him ... I saw him in all some
half-dozen times--liked him instantly, and felt I knew him intimately,
and was looking forward to perhaps years of collaboration with him."
Work brought work, as each thing he did revealed, to those who had eyes
to see, the gift that was in him. At Art Congresses and all assemblies
of Art Workers his co-operation was sought and his presence looked for,
especially by the younger men, who hailed him and his words with
enthusiasm. To these gatherings he brought something more and better
than the sententious wisdom, the chill repression which many feel called
upon to administer on the ground of their experience.[4] He put of the
fire that was in him into the hearts that heard him, he made them proud
of their cause and of their place in it, and hopeful for its triumph and
their own success. It was a contribution of sunshine and fresh air, and
all that is the complete opposite of routine, red-tape, and the
conventional.
[Footnote 4: Qu'est-ce l'experience? Une pauvre petite cabane construite
avec les debris de ces palais d'or et de marbre appeles nos
illusions.--_Joseph Roux._]
We who have watched his progress have noticed of late a considerable
development in his literary power, a more marked individuality of style,
a swifter and smoother movement, a richer vocabulary, and new skill in
the presentation of his ideas. He was exceedingly happy in his
illustrations of a principle, and his figures were always interesting,
never hackneyed. A certain "bonhomie" in his way of putting things won
willing hearers for his words, which seemed to come to meet us with a
smile and open, outstretched hands, as the dear speaker himself was wont
to do. Something of course of the living qualities of speech are lost
when we can receive it only from the cold black and white of print,
instead of winged and full of human music from the man's own lips. Yet,
in spite of this, unless I am mistaken, readers of this book will not
fail to find in it a good deal to justify my judgment.
It seems to have taken some of his friends by surprise that John Sedding
should write on Gardens. They knew him the master of many crafts, but
did not count Garden-craft among them. As a matter of fact, it was a
love that appeared late in life, though all along it must have been
within the man, for the instant he had a garden of his own the passion
appeared full grown. Every evening between five and six, save when his
work called him to distant parts, you might have seen him step quickly
out of the train at the little station of West Wickham, run across the
bridge, and greeting and greeted by everybody, swing along the shady
road leading to his house. In his house, first he kissed his wife and
children, and then supposing there was light and the weather fine, his
coat was off and he fell to work at once with spade or trowel in his
garden, absorbed in his plants and flowers, and the pleasant crowding
thoughts that plants and flowers bring.
After supper he assembled his household to say evening prayers with
them. When all had gone to rest he would settle himself in his little
study and write, write, write, until past midnight, sometimes past one,
dashing now and again at a book upon his shelves to verify some one or
other of those quaint and telling bits which are so happily inwoven into
his text. One fruit of these labours is this book on Garden-craft.
But I have detained the reader long enough. All is by no means told, and
many friends will miss, I doubt not, with disappointment this or that
feature which they knew and loved in him. It cannot be helped. I have
written as I could, not as I would, within the narrow limits which
rightly bound a preface.
How the end came, how within fourteen days the hand of God took from our
midst the much love, genius, beauty which His hand had given us in the
person of John and Rose Sedding, a few words only must tell.
On Easter Monday, March 30th, John Sedding spent two hours in London,
giving the last sitting for the bust which was being modelled at the
desire of the Art Workers' Guild. The rest of the day he was busy in his
garden. Next morning he left early for Winsford, in Somersetshire, to
look after the restoration of this and some other churches in the
neighbourhood. Winsford village is ten miles from the nearest railway
station Dulverton; the road follows the beautiful valley of the Exe,
which rising in the moors, descends noisily and rapidly southwards to
the sea. The air is strangely chill in the hollow of this woody valley.
Further, it was March, and March of this memorable year of 1891. Lines
of snow still lay in the ditches, and in white patches on the northern
side of hedgerows. Within a fortnight of this time men and cattle had
perished in the snow-drifts on the higher ground.
Was this valley the valley of death for our friend, or were the seeds of
death already within him? I know not. Next morning, Wednesday, he did
not feel well enough to get up. His kind hostess, and host, the Vicar of
the parish, did all that kindness--kindness made harder and therefore
more kind by ten miles' distance from a railway station--could do. John
sent for his wife, who came at once, with her baby in her arms. On
Saturday at midnight he received his last Communion. The next day he
seemed to brighten and gave us hopes. On Monday there was a change for
the worse, and on Tuesday morning he passed away in perfect peace.
At the wish of his wife, his grave was prepared at West Wickham. The
Solemn Requiem, by her wish also, was at the church he loved and served
so well, St. Alban's, Holborn. That church has witnessed many striking
scenes, but few more impressive than the great gathering at his funeral.
The lovely children's pall that John Sedding had himself designed and
Rose Sedding had embroidered, covered the coffin, and on the right of it
in a dark mass were gathered his comrades of the Art Workers' Guild.
The tragedy does not end here. On that day week, at that very same hour
and spot, beneath the same pall, lay the body of his dear and devoted
wife.
Side by side, near the tall elms of the quiet Kentish churchyard, the
bodies of John and Rose Sedding are sleeping. The spot was in a sense
chosen by Rose Sedding, if we may use the term 'choice' for her simple
wish that it might be where the sun shines and flowers will grow. The
western slope of the little hill was fixed upon, and already the flowers
they loved so well are blooming over them.
Among the papers of Rose Sedding was found, pencilled in her own
handwriting, the following lines of a 17th century poet:
"'Tis fit one flesh one house should have,
One tomb, one epitaph, one grave;
And they that lived and loved either
Should dye, and lye, and sleep together."[5]
[Footnote 5: The words "'Tis fit one flesh one house should have," &c.,
form part of the epitaph of Richard Bartholomew and his wife in the
parish church of Burford.
How strange that the words should have found in her own case such exact
fulfilment.
E. F. RUSSELL.
ST ALBAN'S CLERGY HOUSE,
BROOKE STREET, HOLBORN.
_June 1891._
It stands thus:--
Lo Hudled up, Together lye
Gray Age, Greene Youth, White Infancy.
If Death doth Nature's law dispence,
And reconciles all difference,
'Tis fit One Flesh One House should have,
One Tombe, One Epitaph, One Grave;
And they that lived and loved either
Should dye and Lye and sleep together.
Goe Reader, whether goe or stay,
Thou must not hence be long away.]
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
I. THE THEORY OF A GARDEN 1
II. ART IN A GARDEN 28
III. HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE SKETCH 41
IV. THE STIFF GARDEN 70
V. THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN" 98
VI. THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING 133
VII. THE TECHNICS OF GARDENING (_CONTINUED_) 153
ON THE OTHER SIDE.
VIII. A PLEA FOR SAVAGERY 183
IX. IN PRAISE OF BOTH 202
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
A GARDEN ENCLOSED _FRONTISPIECE_
PLAN OF ROSARY WITH SUNDIAL TO FACE P. 156
PLAN OF TENNIS LAWN, TERRACES, AND FLOWER
GARDEN 158
GENERAL PLAN OF THE PLEASAUNCE, VILLA
ALBANI, ROME 160
PLAN SHOWING ARRANGEMENT OF SUNK FLOWER
GARDEN, YEW WALK, AND TENNIS COURT 164
PLAN OF SUNK FLOWER GARDEN AND YEW
HEDGES 166
PLAN SHOWING ARRANGEMENT OF FOUNTAIN,
YEW WALK, AND FLOWER BEDS FOR A
LARGE GARDEN 180
PERSPECTIVE VIEW OF GARDEN IN THE PRECEDING
PLAN 180
PERSPECTIVE VIEW OF A DESIGN FOR A GARDEN,
WITH CLIPPED YEW HEDGES AND FLOWER
BEDS 182
GARDEN-CRAFT
CHAPTER I.
ON THE THEORY OF A GARDEN.
"Come hither, come hither, come hither;
Here shall he see
No enemy
But winter and rough weather."
Some subjects require to be delineated according to their own taste.
Whatever the author's notions about it at starting, the subject somehow
slips out of his grasp and dictates its own method of treatment and
style. The subject of gardening answers to this description: you cannot
treat it in a regulation manner. It is a discursive subject that of
itself breeds laggard humours, inclines you to reverie, and suggests a
discursive style.
This much in defence of my desultory essay. The subject, in a manner,
drafts itself. Like the garden, it, too, has many aspects, many
side-paths, that open out broken vistas to detach one's interest and
lure from the straight, broad terrace-platform of orderly discourse. At
first sight, perhaps, with the balanced beauty of the thing in front of
you, carefully parcelled out and enclosed, as all proper gardens are,
the theme may appear so compact, that all meandering after side-issues
may seem sheer wantonness. As you proceed, however, it becomes apparent
that you may not treat of a garden and disregard the instincts it
prompts, the connection it has with Nature, its place in Art, its office
in the world as a sweetener of human life. True, the garden itself is
hedged in and neatly defined, but behind the garden is the man who made
it; behind the man is the house he has built, which the garden adorns;
and every man has his humours; every house has its own conditions of
plan and site; every garden has its own atmosphere, its own contents,
its own story.
So now, having in this short preamble discovered something of the rich
variety and many-sidedness of the subject, I proceed to write down three
questions just to try what the yoke of classification may do to keep
one's feet within bounds: (1) What is a garden, and why is it made? (2)
What ornamental treatment is fit and right for a garden? (3) What should
be the relation of the garden to the house?
Forgive me if, in dealing with the first point, I so soon succumb to the
allurements of my theme, and drop into flowers of speech! To me, then, a
garden is the outward and visible sign of man's innate love of
loveliness. It reveals man on his artistic side. Beauty, it would seem,
has a magnetic charm for him; and the ornamental display of flowers
betokens his bent for, and instinctive homage of beauty. And to say this
of man in one grade of life is to say it of all sorts and conditions of
men; and to say it of one garden is to say it of all--whether the garden
be the child of quality or of lowliness; whether it adorn castle,
manor-house, villa, road-side cottage or signalman's box at the railway
siding, or Japanese or British tea-garden, or Babylonian terrace or
Platonic grove at Athens--in each case it was made for eye-delight at
Beauty's bidding. Even the Puritan, for all his gloomy creed and bleak
undecorated life, is Romanticist here; the hater of outward show turns
rank courtier at a pageant of flowers: he will dare the devil at any
moment, but not life without flowers. And so we have him lovingly
bending over the plants of his home-garden, packing the seeds to carry
with him into exile, as though these could make expatriation tolerable.
"There is not a softer trait to be found in the character of these stern
men than that they should have been sensible of their flower-roots
clinging among the fibres of their rugged hearts, and have felt the
necessity of bringing them over sea and making them hereditary in the
new land." (Hawthorne, "Our Old Home," p. 77.)
But to take a higher point of view. A garden is, in many ways, the "mute
gospel" it has been declared to be. It is the memorial of Paradise lost,
the pledge of Paradise regained. It is so much of earth's surface
redeemed from the scar of the fall:
"Who loves a garden still keeps his Eden."
Its territories stand, so to speak, betwixt heaven and earth, so that
it shares the cross-lights of each. It parades the joys of earth, yet no
less hints the joys of heaven. It tells of man's happy tillage of his
plot of ground, yet blazes abroad the infinite abundance of God's wide
husbandry of the world. It bespeaks the glory of earth's array, yet
publishes its passingness.[6]
[Footnote 6: Think of "a paradise not like this of ours with so much
pains and curiosity made with hands"--says Evelyn, in the middle of a
rhapsody on flowers--"eternal in the heavens, where all the trees are
trees of life, the flowers all amaranths; all the plants perennial, ever
verdant, ever pregnant, and where those who desire knowledge may taste
freely of the fruit of that tree which cost the first gardener and
posterity so dear." (Sylva, "Of Forest-trees," p. 148.)]
Again. The punctual waking of the flowers to new life upon the ruin of
the old is unfavourable to the fashionable theory of extinction, for it
shows death as the prelude of life. Nevertheless, be it admitted, the
garden-allegory points not all one way; it is, so to speak, a paradox
that mocks while it comforts. For a garden is ever perplexing us with
the "riddle of the painful earth," ever challenging our faith with its
counter-proof, ever thrusting before our eyes the abortive effort, the
inequality of lot (two roses on a single stem, the one full-blown, a
floral paragon, the other dwarfed and withered), the permitted spite of
destiny which favours the fittest and drives the weak to the wall--ever
preaching, with damnable iteration, the folly of resisting the ills that
warp life and blight fair promise.
And yet while this is so, the annual spectacle of spring's fresh
repair--the awakening from winter's trance--the new life that grows in
the womb of the tomb--is happy augury to the soul that passes away,
immature and but half-expressed, of lusty days and consummate powers in
the everlasting garden of God. It is this very garden's message, "the
best is yet to be," that smothers the self-pitying whine in poor David
Gray's Elegy[7] and braces his spirit with the tonic of a wholesome
pride. To the human flower that is born to blush unseen, or born,
perchance, not to bloom at all, but only to feel the quickening thrill
of April-passion--the first sweet consciousness of life--the electric
touch in the soul like the faint beatings in the calyx of the rose--and
then to die, to die "not knowing what it was to live"--to such seemingly
cancelled souls the garden's message is "trust, acquiesce, be passive in
the Master's hand: the game of life is lost, but not for aye--
... "There is life with God
In other Kingdom of a sweeter air:
In Eden every flower is blown."
[Footnote 7: "My Epitaph."
"Below lies one whose name was traced in sand--
He died, not knowing what it was to live;
Died while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
And maiden thought electrified his soul:
Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
Bewildered reader, pass without a sigh
In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
In other Kingdom of a sweeter air;
In Eden every flower is blown. Amen."
David Gray ("A Poet's Sketch-book," R. Buchanan, p. 81.)]
To come back to lower ground, a garden represents what one may call the
first simplicity of external Nature's ways and means, and the first
simplicity of man's handling of them, carried to distinction. On one
side we have Nature's "unpremeditated art" surpassed upon its own
lines--Nature's tardy efforts and common elementary traits pushed to a
masterpiece. On the other side is the callow craft of Adam's "'prentice
han'," turned into scrupulous nice-fingered Art, with forcing-pits,
glass-houses, patent manures, scientific propagation, and the accredited
rules and hoarded maxims of a host of horticultural journals at its
back.
Or, to run still more upon fancy. A garden is a place where these two
whilom foes--Nature and man--patch up a peace for the nonce. Outside the
garden precincts--in the furrowed field, in the forest, the quarry, the
mine, out upon the broad seas--the feud still prevails that began as our
first parents found themselves on the wrong side of the gate of
Paradise. But
"Here contest grows but interchange of love"--
here the old foes have struck a truce and are leagued together in a kind
of idyllic intimacy, as is witnessed in their exchange of grace for
grace, and the crowning touch that each puts upon the other's efforts.
The garden, I have said, is a sort of "betweenity"--part heaven, part
earth, in its suggestions; so, too, in its make-up is it part Nature,
part man: for neither can strictly say "I made the garden" to disregard
the other's share in it. True, that behind all the contents of the place
sits primal Nature, but Nature "to advantage dressed," Nature in a rich
disguise, Nature delicately humoured, stamped with new qualities,
furnished with a new momentum, led to new conclusions, by man's skill in
selection and artistic concentration. True, that the contents of the
place have their originals somewhere in the wild--in forest or coppice,
or meadow, or hedgerow, swamp, jungle, Alp, or plain hillside. We can
run each thing to earth any day, only that a change has passed over
them; what in its original state was complex or general, is here made a
chosen particular; what was monotonous out there, is here mixed and
contrasted; what was rank and ragged there, is here taught to be staid
and fine; what had a fugitive beauty there, has here its beauty
prolonged, and is combined with other items, made "of imagination all
compact." Man has taken the several things and transformed them; and in
the process, they passed, as it were, through the crucible of his mind
to reappear in daintier guise; in the process, the face of Nature
became, so to speak, humanised: man's artistry conveyed an added charm.
Judged thus, a garden is, at one and the same time, the response which
Nature makes to man's overtures, and man's answer to the standing
challenge of open-air beauty everywhere. Here they work no longer in a
spirit of rivalry, but for the attainment of a common end. We cannot
dissociate them in the garden. A garden is man's transcript of the
woodland world: it is common vegetation ennobled: outdoor scenery neatly
writ in man's small hand. It is a sort of twin-picture, conceived of
man in the studio of his brain, painted upon Nature's canvas with the
aid of her materials--a twin-essay where Nature's
... "primal mind
That flows in streams, that breathes in wind"
supplies the matter, man the style. It is Nature's rustic language made
fluent and intelligible--Nature's garrulous prose tersely
recast--changed into imaginative shapes, touched to finer issues.
"What is a garden?" For answer come hither: be Fancy's guest a moment.
Turn in from the dusty high-road and noise of practical things--for
"Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love";
descend the octagonal steps; cross the green court, bright with great
urns of flowers, that fronts the house; pass under the arched doorway in
the high enclosing wall, with its gates traceried with rival wreaths of
beaten iron and clambering sprays of jasmine and rose, and, from the
vantage-ground of the terrace-platform where we stand, behold an
art-enchanted world, where the alleys with their giddy cunning, their
gentle gloom, their cross-lights and dappled shadows of waving boughs,
make paths of fantasy--where the water in the lake quivers to the wind's
soft footprints, or sparkles where the swallows dip, or springs in jets
out of shapely fountain, or, oozing from bronze dolphin's mouth, slides
down among moss-flecked stones into a deep dark pool, and is seen anon
threading with still foot the careless-careful curved banks fringed
with flowering shrubs and trailing willows and brambles--where the
flowers smile out of dainty beds in the sunny ecstasy of "sweet
madness"--where the air is flooded with fragrance, and the mixed music
of trembling leaves, falling water, singing birds, and the drowsy hum of
innumerable insects' wings.
"What is a garden?" It is man's report of earth at her best. It is earth
emancipated from the commonplace. Earth is man's intimate
possession--Earth arrayed for beauty's bridal. It is man's love of
loveliness carried to excess--man's craving for the ideal grown to a
fine lunacy. It is piquant wonderment; culminated beauty, that for all
its combination of telling and select items, can still contrive to look
natural, debonair, native to its place. A garden is Nature aglow,
illuminated with new significance. It is Nature on parade before men's
eyes; Flodden Field in every parish, where on summer days she holds
court in "lanes of splendour," beset with pomp and pageantry more
glorious than all the kings'.
"Why is a garden made?" Primarily, it would seem, to gratify man's
craving for beauty. Behind fine gardening is fine desire. It is a plain
fact that men do not make beautiful things merely for the sake of
something to do, but, rather, because their souls compel them. Any
beautiful work of art is a feat, an essay, of human soul. Someone has
said that "noble dreams are great realities"--this in praise of
unrealised dreams; but here, in the fine garden, is the noble dream and
the great reality.
Here it may be objected that the ordinary garden is, after all, only a
compromise between the common and the ideal: half may be for the lust of
the eye, yet half is for domestic drudgery; half is for beauty, half for
use. The garden is contrived "a double debt to pay." Yonder mass of
foliage that bounds the garden, with its winding intervals of turf and
look of expansiveness, it serves to conceal villadom and the hulking
paper-factory beyond; that rock-garden with its developed geological
formation, dotted over with choice Alpine plants, that the stranger
comes to see. It is nothing but the quarry from whence the stone was dug
that built the house. Those banks of evergreens, full of choice
specimens, what are they but on one side the screen to your kitchen
stuff, and on the other side, the former tenant's contrivance to assist
him in forgetting his neighbour? Even so, my friend, an it please you!
You are of those who, in Sainte-Beuve's phrase, would sever a bee in
two, if you could!
The garden, you say, is a compromise between the common and the ideal.
Yet nobility comes in low disguises. We have seen that the garden is
wild Nature elevated and transformed by man's skill in selection and
artistic concentration--wild things to which man's art has given
dignity. The common flowers of the cottager's garden tell of centuries
of collaboration. The flowers and shrubs and trees with which you have
adorned your own grounds were won for you by the curiosity, the
aspiration, the patient roaming and ceaseless research of a long list
of old naturalists; the design of your garden, its picturesque divisions
and beds, a result of the social sense, the faculty for refined
enjoyment, the constructive genius of the picked minds of the civilised
world in all ages. The methods of planting approved of to-day, carrying
us back to the admirably-dressed grounds of the ancient castles and
abbeys, to the love of woodland scenery, which is said to be a special
characteristic of Teutonic people, which is evidenced in the early
English ballads; to the slowly acquired traditions of garden-masters
like Bacon, Temple, Evelyn, Gilpin, and Repton, as well as to the
idealised landscapes of Constable, Gainsborough, Linnell, and Turner; it
is, in fact, the issue of the practical insight, the wood-craft, and
idealistic skill of untold generations.
In this matter of floral beauty and garden-craft man has ever declared
himself a prey to the "malady of the ideal"; the Japanese will even
combine upon his trees the tints of spring and autumn.[8] But
everywhere, and in all ages of the civilised world, man spares no pains
to acquire the choicest specimens, the rarest plants, and to give to
each thing so acquired the ideally best expression of which it is
capable. It is as though Eden-memories still haunted the race with the
solicitude of an inward voice that refused to be silenced, and is
satisfied with nothing short of the best.
[Footnote 8: "This strange combination of autumn and spring tints is a
very usual sight in Japan.... It is worth noting that in Japan a tree is
considered chiefly for its form and tint, not for use.... I heard the
cherry-trees were now budding, so I hurried up to take advantage of
them, and found them more beautiful than I had ever imagined. There are
at least fifty varieties, from delicately tinted white and pink to the
richest rose, almost crimson blossom."--Alfred East's "Trip to Japan,"
_Universal Review_, March, 1890.]
And yet, as some may point out, this homage of beauty that you speak of
is not done for nought; there enters into gardening the spirit of
calculation. A garden is a kind of investment. The labour and
forethought man expends upon it must bring adequate return. For every
flower-bed he lays down, for every plant, or shrub, or tree put into the
ground, his word is ever the same,
"Be its beauty
Its sole duty."
It was not simply to gratify his curiosity, to serve as a pretext for
adventure, that the gardener of old days reconnoitred the globe, culled
specimens, and spent laborious days in studying earth's picturesque
points; it was with a view to the pleasure the things would ultimately
bring. And why not! Had man not served so long an apprenticeship to
Nature on her freehold estate, the garden would not so directly appeal
to our imaginations and command our spirits. A garden reveals man as
master of Nature's lore; he has caught her accents, rifled her motives;
he has transferred her bright moods about his own dwelling, has tricked
out an ordered mosaic of the gleanings of her woodland carpet; has, as
it were, stereotyped the spontaneous in Nature, has entrapped and
rendered beautifully objective the natural magic of the outer world to
gratify the inner world of his own spirit. The garden is, first and
last, made "for delectation's sake."
So we arrive at these conclusions. A garden is made to express man's
delight in beauty and to gratify his instincts for idealisation. But,
lest the explanation savour too much of self-interest in the gardener,
it may be well to say that the interest of man's investment of money and
toil is not all for himself. What he captures of Nature's revenues he
repays with usury, in coin that bears the mint-mark of inspired
invention. This artistic handling of natural things has for result "the
world's fresh ornament,"[9] and for plant, shrub, or tree subject to it,
it is the crowning and completion of those hidden possibilities of
perfection that have lain dormant in them since the world began.
An artist has been defined as one who reproduces the world in his own
image and likeness. The definition is perhaps a little high-flown, and
may confer an autobiographical value to an artist's performances that
would astonish none more than himself. Yet if the thought can be
truthfully applied anywhere, it is where it occurred to Andrew
Marvell--in a garden.
[Footnote 9: "If you look into our gardens annexed to our houses" (says
William Harrison in Holinshed's "Chronicles") "how wonderful is their
beauty increased, not only with flowers, which Columella calleth
_Terrena Sydera_, saying 'Pingit et in varias terrestria, sydera
flores,' and variety of curious and costly workmanship, but also with
rare and medicinable herbs.... How Art also helpeth Nature in the daily
colouring, doubling and enlarging the proportions of our flowers it is
incredible to report, for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now
in these days that they presume to do, in a manner, what they list with
Nature, and moderate her course in things as if they were her superiors.
It is a world also to see how many strange herbs, plants, and annual
fruits are daily brought unto us from the Indies, Americans, Taprobane,
Canary Isles, and all parts of the world, the which, albeit that his
respect of the constitutions of our bodies, they do not grow for us
(because God hath bestowed sufficient commodities upon every country for
her own necessity) yet for delectation's sake unto the eye, and their
odoriferous savours unto the nose, they are to be cherished, and God
also glorified in them, because they are His good gifts, and created to
do man help and service. There is not almost one nobleman, gentleman, or
merchant that hath not great store of these flowers, which now also
begin to wax so well acquainted with our evils that we may almost
account of them as parcel of our own commodities."--(From "Elizabethan
England," pp. 26-7.)]
"The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."
And where can we find a more promising sphere for artistic creation than
a garden? Do we boast of fine ideas and perceptions of beauty and powers
of design! Where can our faculties find a happier medium of expression
or a pleasanter field for display than the garden affords? Nay, to have
the ideas, the faculties, and the chance of their exercise and still to
hold back were a sin! For a garden is, so to speak, the compliment a man
of ideas owes to Nature, to his friends, and to himself.
Many are the inducements to gardening. Thus, if I make a garden, I need
not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools, to prove myself
an artist. Again, a garden is the only form of artistic creation that is
bound by the nature of things to be more lovely in realisation than in
the designer's conception. It is no mere hint of beauty--no mere
tickling of the fancy--that we get here, such as all other arts (except
music) are apt to give you. Here, on the contrary, we are led straight
into a world of actual delights patent to all men, which our eyes can
see, and our hands handle. More than this; whilst in other spheres of
labour the greater part of our life's toil and moil will, of a surety,
end as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is
instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the
end, our labour will be crowned with flowers.
Nor have I yet exhausted the scene of a garden's pleasures. A man gets
undoubted satisfaction in the very expression of his ideas--"the joy of
the deed"--in the sense of Nature's happy response, the delight of
creation,[10] the romance of possibility.
[Footnote 10: Here is Emerson writing to Carlyle of his "new
plaything"--a piece of woodland of forty acres on the border of Walden
Pond. "In these May mornings, when maples, poplars, walnut, and pine are
in their spring glory, I go thither every afternoon and cut with my
hatchet an Indian path thro' the thicket, all along the bold shore, and
open the finest pictures." (John Morley's Essays, "Emerson," p. 304.)
But, as Mr Morley points out, he finds the work too fascinating, eating
up days and weeks; "nay, a brave scholar should shun it like gambling,
and take refuge in cities and hotels from these pernicious
enchantments."]
Some joy shall also come of the identity of the gardener with his
creation.[11] He is at home here. He is intimate with the various
growths. He carries in his head an infinity of details touching the
welfare of the garden's contents. He participates in the life of his
plants, and is familiar with all their humours; like a good host, he has
his eye on all his company. He has fine schemes for the future of the
place. The very success of the garden reflects upon its master, and
advertises the perfect understanding that exists between the artist and
his materials. The sense of ownership and responsibility brings him
satisfaction, of a cheaper sort. His the hand that holds the wand to the
garden's magic; his the initiating thought, the stamp of taste, the
style that gives it circumstance. Let but his hand be withdrawn a space,
and, at this signal, the gipsy horde of weeds and briars--that even now
peer over the fence, and cast clandestine seeds abroad with every
favouring gust of wind--would at once take leave to pitch their tents
within the garden's zone, would strip the place of art-conventions, and
hurry it back to its primal state of unkempt wildness.
[Footnote 11: "I like your Essays," said Henry the Third to Montaigne.
"Then, sire, you will like me. I am my Essays."]
Someone has observed that when wonder is excited, and the sense of
beauty gratified, there is instant recreation, and a stimulus that lifts
one out of life's ordinary routine. This marks the function of a garden
in a world where, but for its presence, the commonplace might
preponderate; 'tis man's recreation ground, children's fairyland, bird's
orchestra, butterfly's banquet. Verse and romance have done well, then,
to link it with pretty thoughts and soft musings, with summer reveries
and moonlight ecstasies, with love's occasion, and youth's yearning. No
fitter place could well be found than this for the softer transactions
of life that awaken love, poesy, and passion. Indeed, were its
winsomeness not balanced by simple human enjoyments--were its charmed
silences not broken by the healthy interests of common daily life--the
romps of children, the clink of tea-cups, the clatter of
croquet-mallets, the _melee_ of the tennis-courts, the fiddler's scrape,
and the tune of moving feet, it might well seem too lustreful a place
for this work-a-day world.
Apart from its other uses, there is no spot like a garden for
cultivating the kindly social virtues. Its perfectness puts people upon
their best behaviour. Its nice refinement secures the mood for
politeness. Its heightened beauty produces the disposition that delights
in what is beautiful in form and colour. Its queenly graciousness of
mien inspires the reluctant loyalty of even the stoniest mind. Here, if
anywhere, will the human hedgehog unroll himself and deign to be
companionable. Here friend Smith, caught by its nameless charm, will
drop his brassy gabble and dare to be idealistic; and Jones, forgetful
of the main chance and "bulls" and "bears," will throw the rein to his
sweeter self, and reveal that latent elevation of soul and tendency to
romance known only to his wife!
"There be delights," says an ancient writer, "that will fetch the day
about from sun to sun, and rock the tedious year as in a delightful
dream." This tells, in terse English, the pleasures of a garden and the
instincts that are gratified in its making. For a garden is Arcady
brought home. It is man's bit of gaudy make-believe--his well-disguised
fiction of an unvexed Paradise--standing witness of his quest of the
ideal--his artifice to escape the materialism of a world that is too
actual and too much with him. A well-kept garden makes credible to
modern eyes the antique fable of an unspoiled world--a world where
gaiety knows no eclipse, and winter and rough weather are held at bay.
In this secluded spot the seasons slip by unawares. The year's
passing-bell is ignored. Decay is cheated of its prize. The invading
loss of cold, or wind, or rain--the litter of battered Nature--the
"petals from blown roses on the grass"--the pathos of dead boughs and
mouldering leaves, the blighted bloom and broken promise of the spring,
autumn's rust or winter's wreckage are, if gardeners be brisk sons of
Adam, instantly huddled out of sight, so that, come when you may, the
place wears a mask of steady brightness; each month has its new dress,
its fresh counterfeit of permanence, its new display of flowers or
foliage, as pleasing, if not so lustrous as the last, that serves in
turn to prolong the illusion and to conceal the secret irony and fond
assumption of the thing.
"I think for to touche also
The world which neweth everie daie,
So far as I can, so as I maie."
This snatch of Gower's rhyme expresses in old phrase the gardener's
desire, or clothed in modern prose by Mr Robinson ("English
Flower-Garden," Murray), it is "to make each place at various seasons,
and in every available situation, an epitome of the great flower-garden
of the world."
We hinted a moment ago of the interest that a garden gathers from the
mark of man's regard and tendence; and if this be true of a modern
garden, how much more true of an old one! Indeed, this is undeniable in
the latter case, for Time is ever friendly to gardens. Ordinarily his
attitude towards all that concerns the memories of man is that of a
jealous churl. Look at history. What is history but one long record of
men who, in this sphere or that, have toiled, striven, sold their souls
even, to perpetuate a name and have their deeds written upon the tablets
of eternity, not reckoning upon the "all oblivious enmity" of Time, who,
with heedless hand, cuts their past into fragments, blots out their
name, confuses their story, and frets with gnawing tooth each vestige of
their handiwork. How, then, we ask--
"How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?"
Yet so it is. He who has no respect for antique glories, who snaps his
fingers at earth's heroes, who overturns the statues of the laurelled
Caesars, encrusts the hieroglyphics of the Pharaohs, and commits their
storied masonry to the mercies of the modern Philistine, will make
exception in a garden. "Time's pencil" helps a garden. In a garden not
only are the solemn shapes and passing conceits of grey epochs treasured
up, even to their minutest particulars, but the drift of the years,
elsewhere so disastrous, serves only to heighten their fascination and
power of appeal.
Thus it comes to pass, that it were scarcely possible to name a more
pathetic symbol of the past than an old garden,[12] nor a spot which, by
its tell-tale shapes, sooner lends itself to our historic sense if we
would recall the forms and reconstruct the life of our ancestors. For we
have here the very setting of old life--the dressed stage of old drama,
the scenery of old gallantry. Upon this terrace, in front of these
flower-beds with these trees looking on, was fought out the old battle
of right and wrong--here was enacted the heroic or the shameful deeds,
the stirring or the humdrum passages in the lives of so many generations
of masters, mistresses, children, and servants, who in far-off times
have lived, loved, and died in the grey homestead hard by. "Now they are
dead," as Victor Hugo says--"they are dead, but the flowers last
always."
[Footnote 12: Time does much for a garden. There is a story of an
American plutocrat's visit to Oxford. On his tour of the Colleges
nothing struck him so much as the velvety turf of some of the
quadrangles. He asked for the gardener, and made minute enquiries as to
the method of laying down and maintaining the grass. "That's all, is
it?" he exclaimed, when the process had been carefully described. "Yes,
sir," replied the gardener with a twinkle in his eye, "That's all, but
we generally leave it three or four centuries to settle down!"]
Admit, then, that for their secret quality, no less than for their
obvious beauty, these old gardens should be treasured. For they are far
more than they seem to the casual observer. Like any other piece of
historic art, the old garden is only truly intelligible through a clear
apprehension of the circumstances which attended its creation. Granted
that we possess the ordinary smattering of historical knowledge, and
the garden will serve to interpret the past and make it live again
before our eyes. For the old place is (to use the journalist's phrase)
an "object lesson" of old manners; it is a proof of ancient genius, a
clue to old romance, a legacy of vague desire. The many items of the
place--the beds and walks with their special trick of "style" the
parterre, the promenoir, the maze, the quincunx, the terraces, the
extravagances in ever-green sculptures of which Pope spoke--what are
they but the mould and figure of old-world thought, down to its most
characteristic caprice! The assertive air of these things--their
prominence in the garden-scenery--bespeak their importance in the
scenery of old life. It was _thus_ that our forefathers made the world
about them picturesque, _thus_ that they coloured their life-dreams and
fitted an adjunct pleasure to every humour, _thus_ that they climbed by
flower-strewn stairs to the realm of the ideal and stimulated their
sense of beauty.
And if further proof be needed of the large hold the garden and its
contents had of the affections of past generations, we have but to turn
to the old poets, and to note how the texture of the speech, the
groundwork of the thought, of men like Milton, Herrick, Vaughan,
Herbert, Donne (not to mention prose-writers) is saturated through and
through with garden-imagery.
In the case of an old garden, mellowed by time, we have, I say, to note
something that goes beyond mere surface-beauty. Here we may expect to
find a certain superadded quality of pensive interest, which, so far as
it can be reduced to words, tells of the blent influences of past and
present, of things seen and unseen, of the joint effects of Nature and
Man. The old ground embodies bygone conceptions of ideal beauty; it has
absorbed human thought and memories; it registers the bequests of old
time. Dead men's traits are exemplified here. The dead hand still holds
sway, the pictures it conjured still endure, its cunning is not
forgotten, its strokes still make the garden's magic, in shapes and hues
that are unchanged save for the slow moulding of the centuries.
_Really_, not less than metaphorically, the garden-growths do keep green
the memories of the men and women who placed them there, as the flower
that is dead still holds its perfume. And few will say that the
chronicles of the dead do not
"Shine more bright in these contents
Than unwept stone besmeared with sluttish time."
There is a wealth of quiet interest in an old garden. We feel
instinctively that the place has been warmed by the sunshine of
humanity; watered from the secret spring of human joy and sorrow.
Sleeping echoes float about its glades; its leafy nooks can tell of
felicities sweeter than the bee-haunted cups of flowers; of glooms
graver than the midnight blackness of the immemorial yews. It is their
suggestion of antique experiences that endues the objective elements in
an old garden like Haddon, or Berkeley, or Levens, or Rockingham, with a
strange eloquence. The recollections of many a child have centred round
these objects: the one touch of romance in a narrow, simple life is
linked with them. Hearts danced or hearts drooped in this vicinity. Eyes
that brimmed over with laughter or that were veiled with tears looked on
these things as we look on them now--drank in the shifting lights and
shadows on the grass--watched the waving of the cedar's dark layers of
shade against an angry sky, "stern as the unlashed eye of God," and all
the birds were silent--once took in the sylvan vistas of trees, lawn,
fir-ridge, the broad-water where the coots and moor-hens now play (as
then) among the green lily-pads and floating weeds, regardless of
Regulas in lead standing in their midst; once dwelt upon the lustrous
flower-beds, on the sundial on the terrace--noonday rendezvous of
fantails--on the "Alley of Sighs," with its clipped beeches, its
grey-stone seat half-way down, its rustle of dying leaves, and
traditions of intrigue; on the lime avenue full of perfume in the
sweet-o'-the-year, on the foot-bridge across the moat, on the streak of
blue autumn mist that tracks the stream in yonder meadows where the
landrail is croaking, and that brings magically near the beat of hoofs,
the jingle of horses' bells, the rumble of homeward wagons on the road,
and whiffs of the reapers' songs; on the brief brilliance of the
garden-panorama as the wintry-moon gives the black clouds the slip and
suddenly discloses a white world of snow-muffled forms, that gleams with
the eerie pallor of a ghost, and is as suddenly dissolved into
darkness.
Simple sights, you will say, and familiar! and yet, when connected with
some unique occasion, some epoch of a life, when seen on such a day, at
such a supreme, all-absorbing moment from window, open door, terrace,
arbour; in the stillness or in the wild rhetoric of the night, the
familiar scene, momentarily flashed upon the brain's retina, may have
subtly and unconsciously influenced the act, or coloured the thought of
some human being, and the brand of that moment's impress may have
accompanied that soul to the edge of doom.
Because of its hoarded memories we come to look upon an old garden as a
sort of repository of old secrets; wrapped within its confines, as
within the covers of a sacred book, repose so many pages of the sad and
glad legend of humanity. We have before us the scenery of old home
idylls, of old household reverences and customs, of old life's give and
take--its light comedy or solemn farce, its dark tragedy, its summer
masque, its stately dance or midnight frolic, its happy wedlock or its
open sorrow, its endured wrong. The place is identified with the
fortunes of old families: for so many generations has the old place been
found favourable for lovers' tales, for youths' golden dreams, for
girls' chime of fancy, for the cut and thrust of friendly wrangles, for
the "leisures of the spirit" of student-recluse, for children's gambols
and babies' lullabies. Seated upon this mossy bank, children have spelt
out fairy tales, while birds, trees, brooks, and flowers listened
together. The marvel of its cloistered grace has been God-reminder to
the saint; its green recesses have served for Enoch's walk,[13] for
poet's retreat; as refuge for the hapless victim of broken endeavour; as
enisled shelter for the tobacco-loving sailor-uncle with a wrecked fame;
as invalid's Elysium; as haunt of the loafing, jesting, unambitioned man
("Alas, poor Yorick!"); as Death's sweet ante-room for slow-footed age.
[Footnote 13: "There is no garden well contrived, but that which hath an
Enoch's walk in it."--SIR W. WALLER.]
What wonder that Sir William Temple devised that his heart should rest
where its memories were so deep-intrenched--in his garden; or that
Waterton should ask to be buried between the two great oaks at the end
of the lake! (Norman Moore's Introduction to "Wanderings in South
America.")
And if human affections be, as the poets declare, immortal, we have the
reason why an old garden, in the only sense in which it ever is old, by
the almanack, has that whisper and waving of secrecy, that air of
watchful intentness, that far-reaching, mythological, unearthly look,
that effect of being a kind of twilighted space common to the two worlds
of past and present. Who will not agree with me in this? It matters not
when you go there--at dawn, at noonday, no less than when the sky is
murky and night-winds are sighing--and although you shall be the only
visible human being present, it is not alone that you feel. A thrill
comes over you, a mysterious sense warns you that this is none other
than the sanctuary of "the dead," as we call them; the place where, amid
the hush of passionless existence, the wide leisure of uncounted time,
the shades of once familiar presences keep their "tongueless vigil."
They fly not at the "dully sound" of human footsteps; they ask no
sympathy for regret which dare not tell the secret of its sorrow; but,
with the gentle gait of old-world courtesy, they move aside, and when
you depart resume occupation of ground which, for the sake of despairing
wishes and memories of an uneffaced past, they may not quit. After
life's fitful fever these waifs of a vanished world sleep not well; here
are some consumed with covetousness, who are learning not to resent the
word "mine" applied by the living owner of hall and garden, field and
store; some that prey on withered bliss--the "bitter sweet of days that
were"--this, the miser whose buried treasure lies undiscovered here, and
who has nothing in God's bank in the other world; this, the author of
the evil book; and this loveless, unlovely pair, the ruined and ruiner,
yoked for aye; a motley band, forsooth, with "Satan's sergeants" keeping
guard!
It is ever the indirect that is most eloquent. Someone says: Hence these
tokens of a dead past open out vistas for one's imagination and drop
hints of romance that would make thrilling reading in many volumes, but
which shall never reach Mudie's.
Even Nature is not proof against the spell of an old garden. The very
trees have an "ancient melody of an inward agony":
"The place is silent and aware
It has had its scenes, its joys, and crimes,
But that is its own affair"--
even Nature forgets to be her cold, impassive self, and puts on a
sympathetic-waiting look in a spot so intricately strewn and meshed over
with the fibres of human experience. Long and close intimacy with
mankind under various aspects--witness of things that happened to
squires, dames, priests, courtiers, servitors, page, or country-maid, in
the roundabout of that "curious, restless, clamorous being which we call
life"--has somehow tinged the place with a sensibility (one had almost
said a _wizardry_) not properly its own. And this superadded quality
reaches to the several parts of the garden and is not confined to the
scene as a whole. Each inanimate item of the place, each spot, seems
invested with a gift of attraction--to have a hidden tongue that could
syllable forgotten names--to possess a power of fixing your attention,
of fastening itself upon your mind, as though it had become, in a sense,
humanised, and claimed kindred with you as related to that secret group
with whose fortunes it was allied, with whose passions it had held
correspondence, and were letting you know it could speak an if it would
of
"All the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."
CHAPTER II.
ON ART IN A GARDEN.
"O world, as God has made it! All is beauty."
ROBERT BROWNING.
In dealing with our second point--the ornamental treatment that is fit
and right for a garden--we are naturally brought into contact with the
good and bad points of both the old and the new systems of gardening.
This being so, it may be well at once to notice the claims of the modern
"Landscape-gardener" to monopolise to himself all the right principles
of garden-craft: all other moods than his are low, all figures other
than his are symbols of error, all dealings with Nature other than his
are mere distortions.
If you have any acquaintance with books upon landscape-gardening written
by its professors or their admirers, you will have learnt that in the
first half of the eighteenth century, two heaven-directed geniuses--Kent
and Brown--all of a sudden stumbled upon the green world of old England,
and, perceiving its rural beauties, and the hitherto unexplored
opportunities for ornamental display that the country afforded, these
two put their heads together, and out of their combined cogitations
sprang the English garden.
This, in brief, is what the landscape-gardener and his adherents say,
and would have you believe; and, to prove their point, they lay stress
upon the style of garden in vogue at the time Kent and Brown began their
experiments, when, forsooth, traditional garden-craft was in its dotage
and had lost its way in the paths of pedantry.
Should you, however, chance to have some actual knowledge of old
gardens, and some insight into the principles which, consciously or
unconsciously governed their making, it may occur to you to ask the
precise points wherein the new methods claim to be different from the
old, what sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of
gardeners that were not shared by English gardeners from time
immemorial. Are there, then, _two_ arts of gardening? or two sorts of
Englishmen to please? Is not modern garden-craft identical with the old,
so far, indeed, as it hath art enough to stand any comparison with the
other at all?
Let us here point to the fact, that any garden whatsoever is but Nature
idealised, pastoral scenery rendered in a fanciful manner. It matters
not what the date, size, or style of the garden, it represents an
idealisation of Nature. _Real_ nature exists outside the artist and
apart from him. The Ideal is that which the artist conceives to be an
interpretation of the outside objects, or that which he adds to the
objects. The garden gives imaginative form to emotions the natural
objects have awakened in man. The _raison d'etre_ of a garden is man's
feeling the _ensemble_.
One fine day you take your architect for a jaunt along a country-lane,
until stopping shyly in front of a five-barred gate, over which is
nailed an ominous notice-board, you introduce him to your small
property, the site of your new house. It is a field very much like the
neighbouring fields--at least, so think the moles, and the rooks, and
the rabbits; not you, for here is to be your "seat" for life; and before
you have done with it, the whole country far and near will be taught to
look as though it radiated round the site and the house you will build
upon it--an honour of which, truth compels me to say, the land betrays
not the remotest presentiment just now!
The field in question may be flat or undulating, it may be the lap of a
hillside, the edge of a moor, a treeless stretch of furrowed land with
traces of "rude mechanical's" usage, or suggestions of mutton or
mangels. The particular character of the place, or its precise
agricultural past, matters not, however; suffice it to say that it is a
bit of raw, and more or less ungroomed, Nature.
Upon this plain, unadorned field, you set your man of imagination to
work. He must absorb both it and its whole surroundings into his brain,
and seize upon all its capabilities. He must produce symmetry and
balance where now are ragged outlines of hillocks and ridges. He must
trim and cherish the trees here, abolish the tree there; enlarge this
slope, level that; open out a partial peep of blue distance here, or a
gleam of silver water there. He must terrace the slope, step by step,
towards the stream at the base, select the sunniest spots for the
flower-beds, and arrange how best the gardens at their varying levels
shall be approached or viewed from the house. In this way and that he
must so manoeuvre the perspective and the lights and shades, so
compose or continue the sectional lines and general bearings of the
ground as to enforce the good points that exist, and draw out the latent
possibilities of the place, and this with as easy a hand, and as fine
tact as the man can muster.
And now to come to our point. A dressed garden, I said, is Nature
idealised--pastoral scenery put fancifully, in man's way. A gardener is
a master of what the French writer calls "the charming art of touching
up the truth."
Emerson observes that all the Arts have their origin in some enthusiasm;
and the art of gardening has for its root, man's enthusiasm for the
woodland world. It indicates a taste for flowers and trees and
landscapes. It is admiration that has, so to speak, passed from the
stage of emotion to that of form. A garden is the result of the
emulation which the vision of beauty in the world at large is ever
provoking in man--
"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures
While the landskip round it measures."
What of Nature has affected man on various occasions, what has pleased
his eye in different moods, played upon his emotions, pricked his fancy,
suggested reverie, stirred vague yearnings, brought a sense of quickened
joy--pastoral scenery, the music of leaves and waters, the hues and
sweetness of country flowers, the gladness of colour, picturesque form
of tree or contour of land, spring's bright laugh, autumn's glow,
summer's bravery, winter's grey blanched face--each thing that has gone
home to him has, in its way, fostered in man the garden mania. Inspired
by their beauty and mystery, he has gathered them to himself about his
home, has made a microcosm out of the various detached details which sum
up the qualities, features, and aspects of the open country; and the art
of this little recreated world is measured by the happy union of
naturalness and of calculated effect.
What sources of inspiration were discovered by the new school of
gardeners, I asked a moment ago, which were not shared by English
gardeners from time immemorial? The art of gardening, I said, has its
root in man's enthusiasm for the woodland world. See how closely the
people of old days must have observed the sylvan sights of Nature, the
embroidery of the meadows, the livery of the woods at different seasons,
or they would not have been capable of building up that piece of hoarded
loveliness, the old-fashioned English garden!
The pleasaunce of old days has been mostly stubbed up by the modern
"landscape gardener," but if no traces of them were left we have still
here and there the well-schemed surroundings of our English
homes--park, avenue, wood, and water--the romantic scenery that hems in
Tintern, Fountains, Dunster, to testify to the inborn genius of the
English for planting. If the tree, shrub, and flower be gone from the
grounds outside the old Tudor mansion, there still remains the
blue-green world in the tapestries upon the walls, with their airy
landscapes of trees and hills, hanging-gardens, flower-beds, terraces,
and embowered nooks--a little fantastical it may be, but none the less
eloquent of appreciation of natural beauty not confined to the gardener,
but shared by the artist-maid, who
... "with her neeld composes
Nature's own shape, of bird, branch, or berry,
That even Art sisters the natural roses."
And should these relics be gone, we still have the books in the library,
rich in Nature-allusion. The simple ecstasies of the early ballad in the
opening stanzas of "Robin Hood and the Monk"--
"In somer when the shawes be sheyne,
And leves be large and longe,
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste
To here the foulys song;
To se the dere draw to the dale,
And leve the hilles hee,
And shadow hem in the leves grene,
Under the grene-wode tre";
or in a "Musical Dreame"--
"Now wend we home, stout Robin Hood,
Leave we the woods behind us.
Love passions must not be withstood,
Love everywhere will find us.
I livde in fielde and downe, and so did he;
I got me to the woods, love followed me."
or shall we hear tell from Chaucer how
"When that Aprille, with his showres swoot
The drought of March hath pierced to the root,
* * * * *
Then longen folk to gone on pilgrimages."
Or hear from Stowe how the cockney of olden days "In the month of May,
namely, on May-day in the morning, every man, except impediment, would
walk in the sweet meddowes and green woods, ther to rejoyce their
spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers and with the
harmonie of birds praysing God in their kinde."
Or shall we turn to Shakespeare's bright incidental touches of
nature-description as in Perdita's musical enumeration of the flowers of
the old stiff garden-borders "to make you garlands of," or the Queen's
bit in "Hamlet," beginning
"There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream."
Or to the old Herbals of Wyer, and Turner, and Gerard, whom Richard
Jefferies[14] pictures walking about our English lanes in old days?
"What wonderful scenes he must have viewed when they were all a tangle
of wild flowers, and plants that are now scarce were common, and the old
ploughs and the curious customs, and the wild red-deer--it would make a
good picture, it really would, Gerard studying English orchids!"
[Footnote 14: "Field and Hedgerow," p. 27.]
Or shall we take down the classic volumes of Bacon, Temple, Evelyn,
Cowley, Isaak Walton, Gilbert White, each in his day testifying to the
inborn love of the English for woodland scenery, their study of nature,
and their taste in trees, shrubs, and flowers. What a vindication is
here of the old-fashioned garden and gardener! What nonsense to set up
Kent and Brown as the discoverers of the green world of old England,
when, as Mr Hamerton remarks in "The Sylvan Year" (p. 173), Chaucer
hardly knows how or when to stop whenever he begins to talk about his
enjoyment of Nature. "Chaucer," he says, "in his passion for flowers,
and birds, and spring mornings in the woods, and by streams, is hard to
quote, for he leads you down to the bottom of the page, and over the
leaf, before you have time to pause."
The question now before us--"What ornament is fit and right for a
garden?"--of itself implies a tendency to err in the direction of
ornament. We see that on the face of it the transposition of the simple
of Nature into the subtle of Art has its dangers. Something may be put,
or something may be left, which were best absent. This may be taken as
an established fact. In making a garden you start with the assumption
that something must be sacrificed of wild Nature, and something must be
superadded, and that which is superadded is not properly of this real,
visible world, but of the world of man's brain.
The very enclosure of our garden-spaces signifies that Nature is held in
duress here. Nature of herself cannot rise above Nature, and man, seeing
perfections through her imperfections, capacities through her
incapacities, shuts her in for cultivation, binds her feet, as it were,
with the silken cord of art-constraint, and puts a gloss of intention
upon her every feature.
In a garden Nature is not to be her simple self, but is to be subject to
man's conditions, his choice, his rejection. Let us briefly see, now,
what conditions man may fairly impose upon Nature--what lengths he may
legitimately go in the way of mimicry of natural effects or of
conventionalism. Both books and our own observation tell us that where
the past generations of gardeners have erred it has been through a
misconception of the due proportions of realism and of idealism to be
admitted into a garden. At this time, in this phase, it was _Art_, in
that phase it was _Nature_, that was carried too far; here design was
given too much rein, there not rein enough, and people in their silly
revolt against Art have gone straight for the "veracities of Nature,"
copying her features, dead or alive, outright, without discrimination as
to their fitness for imitation, or their suitableness to the position
assigned to them. To what extent, we ask, may the forms of Nature be
copied or recast? What are the limits to which man may carry ideal
portraiture of Nature for the purposes of Art? Questions like these
would, of course, only occur to a curious, debating age like ours; but
put this way or that they keep alive the eternal problems of man's
standing to the world of Nature, the laws of idealism and realism, the
nice distinctions of "more and less."
Now, it is not everything in Nature that can, or that may be,
artificially expressed in a garden; nor are the things that it is
permissible to use, of equal application everywhere. It were a palpable
mistake, an artistic crime, so to speak, to follow the wild flights of
Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin, and with them to attempt a little
amateur creation in the way of rent rocks, tumbled hillsides, and ruins
that suggest a recent geological catastrophe, or antique monsters, or
that imply by the scenery that we are living in the days of wattled
abodes and savages with flint hatchets. Much, of course, may be done in
this line in these days as in the past, if only one have sufficient
audacity and a volcanic mind; yet, when it is done, both the value and
the rightness of the art of the thing is questionable. "Canst thou catch
Leviathan with a hook?" The primaeval throes, the grand stupendous
imagery of Nature should be held in more reverence. It were almost as
fit to harness a polar bear to the gardener's mowing-machine as seek to
appropriate the eerie phenomena of Nature in her untamed moods for the
ornamental purposes of a garden. And as to the result of such work, the
ass draped in the lion's skin, roaring horribly, with peaked snout and
awkward shanks visible all the while, is not more ridiculous than the
thinly-veiled savagery of an Italian garden of the seventeenth century.
Here, then, I think we have some guidance as to the principles which
should regulate the choice of the "properties" that are fit for the
scenic show of a garden. We should follow the dictates of good taste
and of common sense. Of things applied direct from Nature the line
should be drawn at the gigantesque, the elemental, the sad, the
gruesome, the crude. True, that in art of another kind--in Architecture
or in Music--the artistic equivalents of these qualities may find place,
but as garden effects they are eminently unsuitable, except, indeed,
where it is desired to perpetrate a grim joke.
Beyond these limitations, however, all is open ground for the
imaginative handling of the true gardener; and what a noble residue
remains! Nature in her health and wealth--green, opulent, lusty Nature
is at his feet. Of things gay, debonair, subtle, and refined--things
that stir poetic feelings or that give joy--he may take to himself and
conjure with to the top of his bent. It is for him as for the poet in
Sir Philip's Sidney's words--"So as he goeth hand in hand with Nature,
not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging
within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so
rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant
rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may
make the too-much loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, _the
poets only deliver a golden_."
Animated with corresponding desire, the gardener resorts to lovely
places in this "too-much loved earth," there to find his stock-in-trade
and learn his craft. We watch him as he hies to the bravery of the
spring-flowers in sunny forest-glades; to meadow-flats where lie the
golden host of daffodils, the lady-smocks, and snake-spotted
fritillaries; we see him bend his way to the field of bluebells, the
hill of primroses that with
"their infinitie
Make a terrestrial gallaxie
As the smal starres do the skie;"
we follow him to the tangled thicket with its meandering walks carpeted
with anemones and hung over with sweet-scented climbers; to the sombre
boskage of the wood, where the shadows leap from their ambush in
unexpected places and the brown bird's song floats upon the wings of
silence: to the green dell with its sequestered pool edged round with
alders, and willow-herb, and king-fern, and mountain-ash afire with
golden fruit: to the corn-field "a-flutter with poppies": to the
broad-terraced downs--its short, springy turf dotted over with white
sheets of thorn-blossom: to the leaping, shining mountain-tarn that
comes foaming out of the wood: to the pine-grove with its columned
blackness and dense thatch of boughs that lisp the message of the wind,
and "teach light to counterfeit a gloom"; to the widespread landscape
with its undulating forest, its clumps of foliage, its gleams of
white-beam, silver-birch, or golden yew, amid the dark blue of firs and
hollies; its emerald meadows, yellow gorse-covers and purple heather;
the many tones of leafage in the spring and fall of the year.
And here I give but a few random sketches of Nature, taken almost at
random from the portfolio of her painted delights--a dozen or more
vignettes, shall we say?--ready-made for garden-distribution in bed,
bank, wilderness, and park; things which the old gardener freely
employed; features and images which he transferred to his dressed
grounds, not copying them minutely but in an ideal manner; mixing his
fancy with their fact, his compulsion with their consent; flavouring the
simple with a dash of the strange and marvellous, combining dreams and
actualities, things seen, with things born "within the zodiac of his own
wit"; frankly throwing into the compacted glamour of the place all that
will give _eclat_ to Nature and teach men to apprehend new joy.
So, then, after separating the brazen from the golden in Nature--after
excluding "properties" of the woodland world which are demonstrably
unfit for the scenic show of a garden, how ample the scope for artistic
creation in the things that remain! And, given an acre or two of land
that has some natural capabilities, some charm of environment--given a
generous client, a bevy of workmen, horses and carts, and, prime
necessity of all, a pleasant homestead in the foreground to prompt its
own adornment and be the centre of your efforts, and, upon the basis of
these old tracks of Nature and old themes of Art, what may not one hope
to achieve of pretty garden-effects that shall please the eye, flatter
the taste, and captivate the imagination of such as love Beauty!
CHAPTER III.
HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE SKETCH OF THE ENGLISH GARDEN.
"The Earth is the garden of Nature, and each fruitful country a
Paradise."--Sir Thomas Browne.
In the last chapter I observed that in dealing with our second
point--the ornamental treatment that is fit for a garden--we should be
brought into contact with the good and bad points of both the old and
new systems of gardening. Hence the following discursus upon the
historic English garden, which will, however, be as short as it can well
be made, not only because the writer has no desire to wander on a far
errand when his interest lies near home, but also because an essay, such
as this, is ever bound to be an inconclusive affair; and 'twere a pity
to lay a heavy burden upon a light horse!
At the outset of this section of our enquiry it is well to realise that
there is little known about the garden of earlier date than the middle
of the sixteenth century. Our knowledge of the mediaeval garden is only
to be acquired piecemeal, out of casual references in old chronicles,
and stray pictures in illuminated manuscripts, and in each case
allowance must be made for the fluent fancy of the artist. Moreover,
early notices of gardens deal mostly with the orchard, or the vegetable
or herb garden, where flowers grown for ornament occur in the borders of
the ground.
It is natural to ascribe the first rudiments of horticultural science in
this country to the Romans; and with the classic pastorals, or Pliny the
Younger's Letter to Apollinaris before us, in which an elaborate garden
is minutely and enthusiastically described, we need no further assurance
of the fitness of the Roman to impart skilled knowledge in all branches
of the science.
Loudon, in his noble "Arboretum et fruticetum Britannicum," enters at
large into the question of what trees and shrubs are indigenous to
Britain, and gives the probable dates of the introduction of such as are
not native to this country. According to Whitaker, whose authority
Loudon adopts, it would appear that the Romans brought us the plane, the
box, the elm, the poplar, and the chestnut. (The lime, he adds, was not
generally planted here till after the time of Le Notre: it was used
extensively in avenues planted here in the reign of Charles the Second.)
Of fruit trees, the Roman gave us the pear, the fig, the damson, cherry,
peach, apricot, and quince. The aboriginal trees known to our first
ancestors are the birch, alder, oak, wild or Scotch pine, mountain-ash
or rowan-tree, the juniper, elder, sweet-gale, dog-rose, heath, St
John's wort, and the mistletoe.
Authorities agree in ascribing the introduction of many other plants,
fruit trees, and trees of ornament or curiosity now common throughout
England, to the monks. And the extent of our indebtedness to the monks
in this matter may be gathered from the fact that monasteries abounded
here in early times; and the religious orders have in all times been
enthusiastic gardeners. Further be it remembered, many of the inmates of
our monasteries were either foreigners or persons who had been educated
in Italy or France, who would be well able to keep this country supplied
with specimens and with reminiscences of the styles of foreign gardens
up to date.
The most valuable authority on the subject of early English gardens is
Alexander Necham, Abbot of Cirencester (1157-1217). His references are
in the shape of notes from a commonplace-book entitled "Of the Nature of
Things," and he writes thus: "Here the gardens should be adorned with
roses and lilies, the turnsole (heliotrope), violets and mandrake; there
you should have parsley, cost, fennel, southern-wood, coriander, sage,
savery, hyssop, mint, rue, dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuces,
garden-cress, and peonies.... A noble garden will give thee also
medlars, quinces, warden-trees, peaches, pears of St Riole,
pomegranates, lemons, oranges, almonds, dates, which are the fruits of
palms, figs, &c."[15] Here, in truth, is a delightful medley of the
useful and the beautiful, just like life! Yet the very use of the term
"noble," as applied to a garden, implies that even the
thirteenth-century Englishman had a standard of excellence to stir
ambition. Other garden flowers mentioned in Alexander's observations are
the sunflower, the iris and narcissus.
[Footnote 15: See "The Praise of Gardens."]
The garden described by Necham bespeaks an amount of taste in the
arrangement of the herbs, plants, and fruit-trees, but in the main it
corresponds with our kitchen-garden. The next English writer upon
gardens in point of date is Johannes de Garlandia, an English resident
in France; but here is a description of the writer's garden at Paris.
The ground here described consists of shrubbery, wood, grove, and
garden, and from the account given it is inferred that both in matters
of taste and in the horticultural and floral products of the garden,
France had advanced farther than England in garden-craft in the
fourteenth century, which is the date of the book.
In Mr Hudson Turner's "Observations on the State of Horticulture in
England"[16] in olden times he gives notices of the early dates in which
the rose was under cultivation. In the thirteenth century King John
sends a wreath of roses to his lady-love. Chronicles inform us that
roses and lilies were among the plants bought for the Royal Garden at
Westminster in 1276; and the annual rendering of a rose is one of the
commonest species of quit-rent in ancient conveyances, like the
"pepper-corn" of later times. The extent to which the culture of the
rose was carried is inferred from the number of sorts mentioned in old
books, which include the red, the sweet-musk, double and single, the
damask, the velvet, the double-double Provence rose, and the double and
single white rose. And the demand for roses seems to have been so great
in old days that bushels of them frequently served as the payment of
vassals to their lords, both in France and England. England has good
reason to remember the distinction between the red and the white rose.
[Footnote 16: "Archaeological Journal," vol. v. p. 295.]
Of all the flowers known to our ancestors, the gilly-flower was perhaps
the most common.
"The fairest flowers o' the season
Are our carnations and streak'd gilly flower."
_Winter's Tale._
"Their use," says a quaint writer, "is much in ornament, and comforting
the spirites by the sence of smelling." The variety of this flower, that
was best known in early times, was the wall gilly-flower, or bee-flower.
Another flower of common growth in mediaeval gardens and orchards is the
periwinkle.
"There sprang the violet all newe,
And fresh periwinkle, rich of hewe,
And flowers yellow, white and rede,
Such plenty grew there nor in the mede."
It is not considered probable that much art was expended in the laying
out of gardens before the fifteenth century; but I give a list of
illuminated MSS. in the Library of the British Museum, where may be
found illustrations of gardens, and which I take from Messrs Birch and
Jenner's valuable Dictionary of Principal Subjects in the British
Museum[17] under the head of Garden.
[Footnote 17: "Early Drawings and Illuminations." Birch and Jenner.
(Bagster, 1879, p. 134.)
"Gardens.
19 D. i. ff. I. etc.
20 A. xvii. f. 7b.
20 B. ii. f. 57.
14 803 f. 63.
18 851 f. 182.
18 852 f. 3. b.
26667 f. i.
Harl. 4425. f. 12. b.
Kings 7. f. 57.
6 E. ix. f. 15. b.
14 E. vi. f. 146.
15 E. iii. f. 122.
15 E. vi. f. 146.
16 G. v. f. 5.
17 F. i. f. 149 _b_.
19 A. vi. f. 2. 109.
19 C. vii. f. i.
20 C. v. ff. 7. _etc._
Eg. 2022. f. 36. _b_.
Harl. 4425. f. 160 _b_.
19720.
19 A. vi. f. 109."]
There is also a typical example of a fourteenth-century garden in the
Romaunt d'Alexandre (Bodleian Library). Here the flower garden or lawn
is separated by a wooden paling from the orchard, where a man is busy
pruning. An old painting at Hampton Court, of the early part of the
sixteenth century, gives pretty much the same class of treatment, but
here the paling is decorated with a chevron of white and red colour.
To judge from old drawings, our forefathers seem to have been always
partial to the greensward and trees, which is the landscape garden in
the "egg"! A good extent of grass is always provided. Formal flower-beds
do not often occur, and, where shown, they are sometimes surrounded by a
low wattled fence--a protection against rabbits, probably. Seats and
banks of chamomile are not unusual. A bank of earth seems to have been
thrown up against the enclosing wall; the front of the bank is then
faced with a low partition of brick or stone, and the mould, brought to
an even surface, is planted in various ways. Numerous illustrations of
the fifteenth century give a bowling-green and butts for archery. About
this date it is assumed the style of English gardening was affected by
French and Flemish methods, which our connection with Burgundy at that
time would bring about. To this period is also ascribed the introduction
of the "mount" in England, although one would almost say that it is but
a survival of the Celtic "barrow." It is a feature that came, however,
into very common use, and is thus recommended by Bacon: "I wish also, in
the very middle, a fair Mount, with three Ascents and Alleys, enough for
four to walk abreast, which I would have to be perfect circles, without
any Bulwarks or Imbossments, and the whole Mount to be thirty foot high,
and some fine Banqueting House with some chimneys neatly cast, and
without too much Glass."
The "mount" is said to have been originally contrived to allow persons
in the orchard to look over the enclosing wall, and would serve not only
as a place from which to enjoy a pretty view, but as a point of outlook
in case of attack. Moreover, when situated in a park where the deer
grazed, the unscrupulous sportsman might from thence shoot a buck. In
early days the mounts were constructed of wood or of stone, and were
curiously adorned within and without. Later on they resumed the old
barrow shape, and were made of earth, and utilized for the culture of
fruit trees. Lawson, an old writer of the sixteenth century, describes
them as placed in divers corners of the orchard, their ascent being made
by "stares of precious workmanship." When of wood, the mount was often
elaborately painted.
An account of works done at Hampton Court in the time of Henry VIII.,
mentions certain expenses incurred for "anticke" works; and referring to
Bailey's Dictionary, published early in the last century, the word
"antick," as applied to curiously-shaped trees, still survives, and is
explained as "odd figures or shapes of men, birds, beasts, &c., cut
out." From the above references, and others of like nature, we know that
the topiary art ("opus topiarum"), which dealt in quaintly-shaped trees
and shrubs, was in full practice here throughout the latter half of the
middle ages. Samuel Hartlib, in a book published in 1659, writes thus:
"About fifty years ago Ingenuities first began to flourish in England."
Lawson, writing in a jocose vein, tells how the lesser wood might be
framed by the gardener "to the shape of men armed in the field ready to
give battell; or swift-running greyhounds, or of well-scented and
true-running hounds to chase the deere or hunt the hare"; adding as a
recommendation that "this kinde of hunting shall not waste your corne,
nor much your coyne!"
I find that John Leland in his Itinerary, 1540, further confirms the use
of highly-decorated mounts: as at Wressel Castle, Yorkshire, he tells of
the gardens with the mote, and the orchards as exceeding fair; "and yn
the orchardes were mounts writhen about with degrees, like the turnings
in cokil shelles, to come to the top without payne." There is still to
be seen, or according to Murray's Guide, 1876, was then to be seen, at
Wotton, in Surrey, an artificial mount cut into terraces, which is a
relic of Evelyn's work.
The general shape of an old-fashioned garden is a perfect square, which
we take to be reminiscent of the square patch of ground which, in early
days, was partitioned off for the use of the family, and walled to
exclude cattle, or to define the property. It also repeats the
quadrangular court of big Tudor houses. We may also assume that the
shape would commend itself to the taste of the Renascence School of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, as being that of classic times; for the
antique garden was fashioned in a square with enclosures of
trellis-work, espaliers, and clipt box hedges, regularly ornamented with
vases, fountains, and statuary.
The square shape was common to the French and Italian gardens also. Old
views of Du Cerceau, an architect of the time of Charles IX. and Henry
III., show a square in one part of the grounds and a circular labyrinth
in another: scarcely a plot but has this arrangement. The point to note,
however, is, that while the English garden might take the same general
outline as the foreign, it had its own peculiarities; and although each
country develops the fantastic ornament common to the stiff garden of
the period in its own way, things are not carried to the same pitch of
extravagant fancy in England as in France, Holland, or Italy.
Upon a general review of the subject of ornamental gardens, English and
foreign, we arrive at the conclusion that the type of garden produced by
any country is a question of soil and physical features, and a question
of race. The character of the scenery of a country, the section of the
land generally, no less than the taste of the people who dwell in it,
prescribes the style of the type of garden. The hand of Nature directs
the hand of Art.
Thus, in a hilly country like Italy, Nature herself prompts the division
of the garden-spaces into wide terraces, while Art, on her side,
provides that the terraces shall be well-proportioned as to width and
height, and suitably defined by masonry walls having balustraded fronts,
flights of steps, arcades, temples, vases, statues, &c.
Lady Mary Montagu's description of the _Giardino Jiusti_ is a case in
point: she depicts, as far as words can, how admirably it complies with
the conditions of the scenery. The palace lies at the foot of a mountain
"near three miles high, covered with a wood of orange, lemon, citron,
and pomegranate trees, which is all cut up into walks, and divided into
terraces that you may go into a separate garden from every floor of the
house, diversified with fountains, cascades, and statues, and joined by
easy marble staircases, which lead from one to another." It is a hundred
years since this description was written, but the place is little
altered to this day: "Who will now take the pains to climb its steep
paths, will find the same charm in the aged cypresses, the oddly clipped
ilexes and boxes, the stiff terraces and narrow, and now overgrown,
beds."[18]
[Footnote 18: "The Garden."--WALTHER HOWE.]
In France, where estates are larger, and the surface of the country more
even and regular, the ornamental grounds, while following the Italian in
certain particulars, are of wider range on the flat, and they attain
picturesqueness upon lines of their own. The taste of the people,
conveniently answering to the conditions of the country, runs upon long
avenues and spacious grounds, divided by massive trellises into a series
of ornamental sections--_Bocages_, _Cabinets de Verdure_, &c., which by
their form and name, flatter the Arcadian sentiment of a race much given
to idealisation. "I am making winding alleys all round my park, which
will be of great beauty," writes Madame de Sevigne, in 1671. "As to my
labyrinth, it is neat, it has green plots, and the palisades are
breast-high; it is a lovable spot."
The French have parks, says the travelled Heutzner, but nothing is more
different, both in compass and direction, than those common to England.
In France they invented the parks as fit surroundings to the fine
palaces built by Mansard and Le Notre, and the owners of these stately
chateaux gratified their taste for Nature in an afternoon promenade on a
broad stone terrace, gazing over a carved balustrade at a world made
truly artificial to suit the period. The style of Le Notre is, in fact,
based upon the theory that Nature shall contribute a bare space upon
which man shall lay out a garden of symmetrical character, and trees,
shrubs, and flowers are regarded as so much raw material, out of which
Art shall carve her effects.
Indeed, the desire for symmetry is carried to such extravagant lengths
that the largest parks become only a series of square or oblong
enclosures, regularly planted walks, bounded by chestnuts or limes;
while the gardens are equally cut up into lines of trellises and
palisades. In describing the Paris gardens Horace Walpole says, "they
form light corridors and transpicuous arbours, through which the
sunbeams play and checker the shade, set off the statues, vases, and
flowers, that marry with their gaudy hotels, and suit the gallant and
idle society who paint the walks between their parterres, and realise
the fantastic scenes of Watteau and Durfe!" In another place he says
that "many French groves seem green chests set upon poles. In the garden
of Marshall de Biron, at Paris, consisting of fourteen acres, every walk
is button-holed on each side by lines of flower-pots, which succeed in
their seasons. When I saw it there were nine thousand pots of asters or
la Reine Marguerite."
In Holland, which Butler sarcastically describes as
"A land that rides at anchor, and is moor'd,
In which they do not live, but go aboard"--
the conditions are not favourable to gardening. Man is here indebted to
Nature, in the first place, for next to nothing: Air, Earth, and Water
are, as it were, under his control. The trees grow, the rivers run, as
they are directed; and the very air is made to pay toll by means of the
windmills.
To begin with, Holland has a meagre list of indigenous trees and shrubs,
and scarcely an indigenous ligneous flora. There is little wood in the
country, for the heavy winds are calculated to destroy high-growing
trees, and the roots cannot penetrate into the ground to any depth,
without coming to water. The land is flat, and although artificial
mountains of granite brought from Norway and Sweden have been erected as
barriers against the sea, there is scarcely a stone to be found except
in the Island of Urk.
The conditions of the country being so unfavourable to artistic
handling, it needs a determined effort on man's part to lift things
above the dead-level of the mean and commonplace. Yet see how Nature's
defects may only prove Art's opportunity! Indeed, it is singular to note
how, as it were, in a spirit of noble contrariness, the Dutch garden
exhibits the opposite grace of each natural defect of the land. The
great plains intersected with sullen watercourses yield up only slight
strips of land, _therefore_ these niggardly strips, snatched from "an
amphibious world" (as Goldsmith terms it), shall be crammed with beauty.
The landscape outside gapes with uniform dulness, _therefore_ the garden
within shall be spick and span. The flat treeless expanse outside offers
no objects for measuring distance, _therefore_ the perspective of the
garden shall be a marvel of adroit planning and conjured proportions.
The room is small, _therefore_ its every inch shall seem an ell. The
garden is a mere patch, _therefore_ the patch shall be elaborately
darned and pattern-stitched all over. The eye may not travel far, or can
get no joy in a distant view, _therefore_ it shall rest in pure content,
focussed upon a scene where rich and orderly garniture can no farther
go.
Thus have the ill-conditions of the land proved blessings in disguise.
Necessity, the mother of invention, has produced the Dutch garden out of
the most untoward geography, and if we find in its qualities and
features traces of the conditions which surrounded its birth and
development it is no wonder. Who shall blame the prim shapes and
economical culture where even gross deception shall pass for a virtue if
it be successful! Or the regular strips of ground, the long straight
canals, the adroit vistas of grassy terraces long-drawn out, the trees
ranged in pots, or planted in the ground at set intervals and carefully
shorn to preserve the limit of their shade! Nay, one can be merciful to
the garden's usual crowning touch, which you get at its far end--a
painted landscape of hills and dales and clumps of trees to beguile the
enamoured visitor into the fond belief that Holland is not Holland: and,
in the foreground the usual smiling wooden boy, shooting arrows at
nothing, happy in the deed, and tin hares squatting in likely nooks,
whose shy hare eyes have worn the same startled gaze these sixty years
or more, renewed with fresh paint from time to time as rust requires.
Yet the Earth is richer and mankind happier for the Dutch garden!
And, as though out of compassion for the Dutchman's difficulties, kind
Nature has put into his hands the bulb, as a means whereby he may attain
the maximum of gaudy colour within the minimum of space. Given a few
square yards of rescued earth and sufficient manure, and what cannot the
neat-handed, frugal-minded, microscopic-eyed Dutchman do in the way of
concentrated design with his bulbs, his clipt shrubs, his trim beds, his
trickles of water, and strips of grass and gravel! And should all other
resources fail he has still his pounded brick-dust, his yellow sand, his
chips of ores and spars and green glass, which, though they may serve
only remotely to suggest Nature, will at all events carry your mind off
to the gay gardens of precious stones of fairyland literature!
Indeed, once embarked upon his style of piquancy-at-any-price, and it is
hard to see where the Dutch gardener need stop! In this sophisticated
trifling--this lapidary's mosaic--this pastry-cook's decoration--this
child's puzzle of coloured earth, substituted for coloured living
flowers--he pushes Art farther than the plain Englishman approves. It
is, however, only one step farther than ordinary with him. All his
dealings with Nature are of this abstract sort: his details are clever,
and he is ingenious, if not imaginative, in his wholes. Still, I repeat,
the Earth is richer, and mankind happier for the Dutch garden. There is
an obvious excuse for its over-fancifulness in George Meredith's remark
that "dulness is always an irresistible temptation for brilliance." That
the Dutchman should be thus able to compete with unfriendly Nature, and
to reverse the brazen of the unkind land of his birth, is an achievement
that reflects most creditably upon the artistic capacities of his
nation.
But England--
"This other Eden, demi-paradise"--
suggests a garden of a less-constrained order than either of these. Not
that the English garden is uniformly of the same type, at the same
periods. The variety of the type is to be accounted for in two ways:
firstly, by the ingrained eclecticism of the British mind; secondly, by
the changeful character of the country--this district is flat and open,
this is hilly--so that mere conformity to the lie of the land would
produce gardens which belong now to the French type, now to the Italian.
It is the same with British Art of all kinds, of all times: in days long
before the Norman visitation and ever since, the English Designer has
leant more or less upon foreign initiative, which goes to prove either
how inert is his own gift of origination, or how devious may be the
tastes of a mixed race.
But if the English garden cannot boast of singular points of interest,
if its art reflects foreign countries, it bears the mark of the English
taste for landscape, which gives it distinction and is suggestive of
very charming effects. The transcendent characteristic of the English
garden is derived from and gets its impulse from the prevailing
influence of Nature at home. It has the characteristics of the country.
It is, I know, commonly held now-a-days that the taste for landscape is
wholly of modern growth. So far as England is concerned it came in, they
say, with Thomson in poetry, and with Brown in gardens. So far as
relates to the _conscious_ relish for Nature, so far as relates to the
love of Nature as a mirror of the moods of the mind, or as a refuge from
man, this assertion may be true enough. Yet, surely the _conscious_
delight in landscape must have been preceded by an _unconscious_
sympathy this way: it could not have sprung without generation. Artistic
sight is based upon instinct, feeling, perceptions that reach one knows
not how far back in time, it does not come by magic.
See also what a rude, slatternly affair this much-lauded
landscape-garden of the "immortal Brown" was! Here are two sorts of
gardens--the traditional garden according to Bacon, the garden according
to Brown. Both are Nature, but the first is Nature in an ideal dress,
the second is Nature with no dress at all. The first is a garden for a
civilised man, the second is a garden for a gipsy. The first is a
picture painted from a cherished model, the second is a photograph of
the same model undressed. Brown's work, in fact, represents the garden's
return to its original barbaric self--the reinauguration of the
elemental. Let it not be said, then, that Brown discovered the model,
for her fairness was an established fact or she would not have been so
richly apparelled when he lighted upon her. In other words, the love of
the Earth--"that green-tressed goddess," Coleridge calls her--was no new
thing in Brown's day: the sympathy for the woodland world, the love of
tree, flower, and grass is behind the manipulated stiff garden of the
fifteenth and two succeeding centuries, and it is the abiding source of
all enthusiasm in garden-craft.
How long this taste for landscape had existed in pre-Thomsonian days it
does not fall to us to determine. Suffice it to say that so long as
there has been an English school of gardening this sympathy for
landscape has found expression in the English garden.[19] The high thick
garden-walls of the old fighting-days shall have ample outlooks in the
shape of "mounts," from whence views may be had of the open country. The
ornamental value of forest trees is well-known and appreciated. Even in
the thirteenth century the English gardener is on the alert for new
specimens and "trees of curiosity," and he is a master of horticulture.
In Chaucer's day he revels in the greensward,
"Ful thikke of gras, ful softe and swete."
And the early ballads as I have already shown are full of allusion to
scenery and woodland. In the days of fine gardens the Englishman must
still have his four acres "to the green," his adjuncts of shrubbery,
wilderness, and park. Nay, Henry VIII.'s garden at Nonsuch, had its
wilderness of ten acres. "Chaucer opens his Clerke's Tale with a bit of
landscape admirable for its large style," says Mr Lowell, "and as well
composed as any Claude" ("My Study Windows," p. 22). "What an airy
precision of touch is here, and what a sure eye for the points of
character in landscape." So, too, can Milton rejoice in
"Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plain,"
and Herrick:
"Sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers."
[Footnote 19: "English scenery of that special type which we call
homely, and of which we are proud as only to be found in England, is,
indeed, the production of many centuries of that conservatism which has
spared the picturesque timber, and of that affectionate regard for the
future which has made men delight to spend their money in imprinting on
the face of Nature their own taste in trees and shrubs." ("Vert and
Venery," by VISCOUNT LYMINGTON; _Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891.)]
Nor is this taste for landscape surprising in a country where the
natural scenery is so fair and full of meaning. There are the solemn
woods, the noble trees of forest and park: the "fresh green lap" of the
land, so vividly green that the American Hawthorne declares he found "a
kind of lustre in it." There is the rich vegetation, and "in France, and
still less in Italy," Walpole reminds us, "they could with difficulty
attain that verdure which the humidity of our climate bestows." There
are the leafy forest ways gemmed with flowers; the vast hunting-grounds
of old kings, the woodland net of hazel coppice, the hills and dales,
sunned or shaded, the plains mapped out with hedgerows and enlivened
with the glitter of running water: the heather-clad moors, the golden
gorse covers, the rolling downs dotted over with thorns and yews and
chalk cliffs, the upland hamlets with their rosy orchards, the farm
homesteads nestling in green combes, the grace of standing corn, the
girdle of sea with its yellow shore or white, red, or grey rocks, its
wolds and tracts of rough uncultivated ground, with bluffs and bushes
and wind-harassed trees--Nature's own "antickes"--driven like green
flames, and carved into grotesque shapes by the biting gales. There are
the
"Russet lawns, and fallows grey
Where the nibbling flocks do stray,
Mountains on whose barren breast
The labouring clouds do often rest,
Meadows prim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide"--
the land that Richard Jefferies says "wants no gardening, it _cannot_ be
gardened; the least interference kills it"--English woodland whose
beauty is in its detail. There is nothing empty and unclothed here. Says
Jefferies, "If the clods are left a little while undisturbed in the
fields, weeds spring up and wild flowers bloom upon them. Is the hedge
cut and trimmed, lo! the bluebells flower the more, and a yet fresher
green buds forth upon the twigs." "Never was there a garden like the
meadow," cries this laureate of the open fields; "there is not an inch
of the meadow in early summer without a flower."
And if the various parts and details of an English landscape are so
beautiful in themselves, what shall we say of the scenery when Nature,
turned artist, sweeps across it the translucent tints of dawn or sunset,
or wind and cloud-fantasy; or veil of purple mist, or grey or red haze,
or drift of rain-shower thrown athwart the hills, for the sunbeams to
try their edge upon; or any of the numberless atmospheric changes, pure
and tender, stern and imperious, that our humid climate has ever ready
to hand!
Shut in, as we in England are, with our short breadths of view ("on a
scale to embrace," remarks George Meredith), folded, as it were, in a
field-sanctuary of Nature-life--girt about with scenery that is at once
fair, compact, sweetly familiar and companionable, yet so changefully
coloured, so full of surprises as the day jogs along to its evensong as
to hold observation on the stretch, to force attention to Nature's last
word, to fill the fallow-mind of lonely country folk with gentle wonder,
and swell the "harvest of a quiet eye," is it strange that a land like
ours should have bred an unrivalled school of Nature-readers among
gardeners, painters, and poets? "As regards grandeur," says Hawthorne,
"there are loftier scenes in many countries than the best that England
can show; but, for the picturesqueness of the smallest object that lies
under its gentle gloom and sunshine, there is no scenery like it
anywhere." ("Our Old Home," p. 78.)
The _real_ world of England, then, is, in the Englishman's opinion,
itself so fair "it wants no gardening." Our school of gardeners seem to
have found this out; for the task of the gardener has been rather that
of translator than of creator; he has not had to labour at an artificial
world he himself had made, but only to adorn, to interpret the world as
it is, in all its blithe freedom. "The earth is the garden of Nature,
and each fruitful country a Paradise;" and in England, "the world's best
garden," man has only had to focus the view and frame it. Flowers,
odours, dews, glistening waters, soft airs and sounds, noble trees,
woodland solitudes, moonlight bowers, have been always with us.
It might seem ungenerous to institute a comparison between the French
and English styles of gardening, and to put things in a light
unfavourable to the foreigner, had not the task been already done for us
by a Frenchman in a most outspoken manner. Speaking of the French
gardens, Diderot, in his Encyclopaedia (_Jardin_) says: "We bring to bear
upon the most beautiful situations a ridiculous and paltry taste. The
long straight alleys appear to us insipid; the palisades cold and
formless. We delight in devising twisted alleys, scroll-work parterres,
and shrubs formed into tufts; the largest lots are divided into little
lots. It is not so with a neighbouring nation, amongst whom gardens in
good taste are as common as magnificent palaces are rare. In England,
these kinds of walks, practicable in all weathers, seem made to be the
sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure; the body is there relaxed, the
mind diverted, the eyes are enchanted by the verdure of the turf and the
bowling-greens; the variety of flowers offers pleasant flattery to the
smell and sight, Nature alone, modestly arrayed, and never made up,
there spreads out her ornaments and benefits. How the fountains beget
the shrubs and beautify them! How the shadows of the woods put the
streams to sleep in beds of herbage." This is poetry! but it is well
that one French writer (and he so distinguished) should be found to
depict an English garden, when architects like Jussieu and Antoine
Richard signally failed to reproduce the thing, to order, upon French
soil! And the _Petit Trianon_ was in itself an improvement upon, or
rather a protest against, the sumptuous splendour of the _Orangerie_,
the basins of Latona and of Neptune, and the superb _tapis vert_, with
its bordering groves of clipt trees and shrubs. Yet here is Arthur
Young's unflattering description of the Queen's _Jardin Anglois_ at
Trianon: "It contains about 100 acres, disposed in the taste of what we
read of in books of Chinese gardening, whence it is supposed the English
style was taken. There is more of Sir William Chambers here than of Mr
Brown,[20] more effort than Nature, and more expense than taste. It is
not easy to conceive anything that Art can introduce in a garden that is
not here; woods, rocks, lawns, lakes, rivers, islands, cascades,
grottoes, walks, temples, and even villages." Truly a _Jardin Anglois_!
[Footnote 20: Miss Edwards (and I quote from her edition of Young's
"Travels in France," p. 101) has a note to the effect that the Mr Brown
here referred to is "Robert Brown, of Markle, contributor to the
_Edinburgh Magazine_, 1757-1831." Yet, surely this is none other than Mr
"Capability" Brown, discoverer of English scenery, reputed father of the
English garden!]
We may well prefer Diderot's simile for the English garden as "the
sanctuary of a sweet and placid pleasure" to the bustling crowd of
miscellaneous elements that took its name in vain in the _Petit
Trianon_!
For an English garden is at once stately and homely--homely before all
things. Like all works of Art it is conventionally treated, and its
design conscious and deliberate. But the convention is broad, dignified,
quiet, homogeneous, suiting alike the characteristics of the country and
of the people for whom it is made. Compared with this, the foreign
garden must be allowed to be richer in provocation; there is distinctly
more fancy in its conceits, and its style is more absolute and
circumspect than the English. And yet, just as Browning says of
imperfection, that it may sometimes mean "perfection hid," so, here our
deficiencies may not mean defects.
In order that we may compare the English and foreign garden we must
place them on common ground; and I will liken each to a pastoral
romance. Nature is idealised, treated fancifully in each, yet how
different the quality of the contents, the method of presentment, the
style, the technique of this and that, even when the design is
contemporaneous!
A garden is, I say, a sort of pastoral romance, woven upon a background
of natural scenery. In the exercise of his pictorial genius, both the
foreign and English artist shall run upon natural things, and
transcribe Nature imaginatively yet realisably; each composition shall
have a pastoral air, and be rustic after its fashion. But how different
the platform, how different the mental complexion, the technique of the
artists! How different the detail and the atmosphere of the garden. The
rusticity of the foreign garden is dished up in a more delectable form
than is the case in the English, but there is not the same open-air
feeling about this as about that; it does not convey the same sense of
unexhausted possibilities--not the same tokens of living enjoyment of
Nature, of heart-to-heart fellowship with her. The foreign garden is
over-wrought, too full: it is a passionless thing--like the gaudy birds
of India, finely plumed but songless; like the prize rose, without
sweetness.
Of the garden of Italy, who shall dare to speak critically. Child of
tradition: heir by unbroken descent, inheritor of the garden-craft of
the whole civilised world. It stands on a pinnacle high above the
others, peerless and alone: fit for the loveliest of lands--
... "Woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by Earth's male-lands,
Laid to their hearts instead"--
and it may yet be seen upon its splendid scale, splendidly adorned, with
straight terraces, marble statues, clipped ilex and box, walks bordered
with azalea and camellia, surrounded with groves of pines and
cypresses--so frankly artistic, yet so subtly blending itself into the
natural surroundings--into the distant plain, the fringe of purple
hills, the gorgeous panorama of the Alps with its background of glowing
sky. With such a radiant country to conjure with, we may truly say "The
richly provided, richly require."
If we may speak our mind of the French and Dutch gardens, they in no
wise satisfy English taste as regards their relation to Nature. Diderot
has said that it is the peculiarity of the French to judge everything
with the mind. It is from this standpoint that the Frenchman treats
Nature in a garden. He is ever seeking to unite the accessory portions
with the _ensemble_. He overdoes design. He gives you the impression
that he is far more in love with his own ideas about Nature than with
Nature herself; that he uses her resources not to interpret them or
perfect them along their own lines, but express his own interesting
ideas. He must provide stimulus for his imagination; his nature demands
food for reverie, point for ecstasy, for delicious self-abandonment, for
bedazzlement with ideal beauty, and the garden shall supply him with
these whatever the cost to the materials employed. Hence a certain
unscrupulousness towards Nature in the French garden; hence the daring
picturesqueness, its legerdemain. Nature edited thus, is to the
Englishman but Nature in effigy, Nature used as a peg for fantastical
attire, Nature with a false lustre that tells of lead alloy--Nature that
has forgotten what she is like.
In an English garden, as Diderot notes, Nature is handled with more
reverence, her rights are more respected. I am willing to allow that
something of the reserve traceable in English art is begotten of the
phlegmatic temper of the race that rarely gets beyond a quiescent
fervour; and this temper, exhibited in a garden would incline us always
to let well alone and not press things too hard. If the qualities of an
English garden that I speak of are to be attributed to this temper,
then, to judge by results, _laissez faire_ is not a bad motto for the
gardener! Certain it is that the dominance of man is more hinted at here
than proclaimed. Compared with foreign examples we sooner read through
its quaintnesses and braveries their sweet originals in Nature: nay,
even when we have idealised things to our hearts' full bent, they shall
yet retain the very note and rhythm of the woodland world from whence
they sprang--"English in all, of genius blithely free."[21]
[Footnote 21: Lowell's "Ode to Fielding."]
And this is true even in that extreme case, the Jacobean garden, where
we have much the same quips and cranks, the same quaint power of
metrical changes and playful fancy of the poetry of Herbert, Vaughan,
Herrick, and Donne; even the little clean-cut pedantries of this
artfullest of all phases of English garden-craft make for a kind of
bland stateliness and high-flown serenity, that bases its appeal upon
placid beauty rather than upon mere ingenuity or specious extravagance.
The conventionalities of its borders, its terraces and steps and images
in lead or marble, its ornamental water, its trim geometrical patterns,
its quincunx, clipped hedges, high hedges, and architectural adornments
shall be balanced by great sweeps of lawn and noble trees that are not
constrained to take hands, as in France, across the road and to look
proper, but are left to grow large and thick and wide and free. True
that there is about the Jacobean garden an air of scholarliness and
courtliness; a flavour of dreamland, Arcadia, and Italy--a touch of the
archaic and classical--yet the thing is saved from utter affectation by
our English out-of-door life which has bred in us an innate love of the
unconstrained, a sympathy that keeps its hold on reality, and these give
an undefinable quality of freshness to the composition as a whole.[22]
[Footnote 22: "Mr _Evelyn_ has a pleasant villa at _Deptford_," writes
Gibson, "a fine garden for walks and hedges (especially his holly one
which he writes of in his 'Sylva') ... In his garden he has four large
round philareas, smooth-clipped, raised on a single stalk from the
ground, a fashion now much used. _Part of his garden is very woody and
shady for walking_; but his garden not being walled, has little of the
best fruits."]
To sum up. The main difference in the character of the English and the
foreign schools of gardening lies in this, that the design of the
foreign leans ever in the direction of artificiality, that of England
towards natural freedom. And a true garden should have an equal regard
for Nature and Art; it should represent a marriage of contraries, should
combine finesse and audacity, subtilty and simplicity, the regular and
the unexpected, the ideal and the real "bound fast in one with golden
ease." In a French or Dutch garden the "yes" and "no" of Art and Nature
are always unequally yoked. Nature is treated with sparse courtesy by
Art, its individuality is ignored, it sweats like a drudge under its
load of false sentiment. "Sike fancies weren foolerie."
But in England, though we hold Nature in duress, we leave her unbound;
if we mew her up for cultivation, we leave her inviolate, with a chance
of vagrant liberty and a way of escape. Thus, you will note how the
English garden stops, as it were, without ending. Around or near the
house will be the ordered garden with terraces and architectural
accessories, all trim and fit and nice. Then comes the smooth-shaven
lawn, studded and belted round with fine trees, arranged as it seems
with a divine carelessness; and beyond the lawn, the ferny heather-turf
of the park, where the dappled deer browse and the rabbits run wild, and
the sun-chequered glades go out to meet, and lose themselves "by green
degrees" in the approaching woodland,--past the river glen, the steep
fields of grass and corn, the cottages and stackyards and grey church
tower of the village; past the ridge of fir-land and the dark sweep of
heath-country into the dim waving lines of blue distance.
So that however self-contained, however self-centred the stiff old
garden may seem to be, it never loses touch with the picturesque
commonplaces of our land; never loses sympathy with the green world at
large, but, in a sense, embraces and locks in its arms the whole
country-side as far as eye can see.
CHAPTER IV.
HISTORICAL SKETCH--CONTINUED.
THE STIFF GARDEN.
"All is fine that is fit."
The English garden, as I have just tried to sketch it, was not born
yesterday, the bombastic child of a landscape-gardener's recipe. It
epitomises a nation's instincts in garden-craft; it is the slow result
of old affection for, old wonder at, beauty in forms, colours, tones;
old enthusiasm for green turf, wild flower, and forest tree. Take it at
its best, it records the matured taste of a people of Nature-readers,
Nature-lovers: it is that which experience has proved to be in most
accord with the character and climate of the country, and the genius of
the race.
Landscape has been from the first the central tradition of English art.
Life spent amidst pictorial scenery like ours that is striking in itself
and rendered more impressive and animated by the rapid atmospheric
changes, the shifting lights and shadows, the life and movement in the
sky, and the vivid intense colouring of our moist climate, has given our
tastes a decided bent this way, and fashioned our Arts of Poetry,
Painting, and Gardening. Out-of-door life among such scenery puts our
senses on the alert, and the impressions of natural phenomena supply our
device with all its images.
The English people had not to wait till the eighteenth century to know
to what they were inclined, or what would suit their country's
adornment. From first to last, we have said, the English garden deals
much with trees and shrubs and grass. The thought of them, and the
artistic opportunities they offer, is present in the minds of
accomplished garden-masters, travelled men, initiated spirits, like Sir
Thomas More, Bacon, Shaftesbury, Temple, and Evelyn, whose aim is to
give garden-craft all the method and distinctness of which it is
capable. However saturated with aristocratic ideas the courtier-gardener
may be, however learned in the circumspect style of the Italian, he
retains his native relish for the woodland world, and babbles of green
fields. A sixteenth-century English gardener (Gerarde) adjured his
countrymen to "Go forwarde in the name of God, graffe, set, plant, and
nourishe up trees in every corner of your grounde." A
seventeenth-century gardener (Evelyn) had ornamental landscape and shady
woods in his garden as well as pretty beds of choice flowers.
"There are, besides the temper of our climate," writes another
seventeenth-century garden-worthy (Temple), "two things particular to
us, that contribute to the beauty and elegance of our gardens, which are
the gravel of our walks and the fineness and almost perpetual greenness
of our turf; the first is not known anywhere else, which leaves all
their dry walks in other countries very unpleasant and uneasy; the other
cannot be found in France or in Holland as we have it, the soil not
admitting that fineness of blade in Holland, nor the sun that greenness
in France during most of the summer." And following upon this is a long
essay upon the ornamental disposition of the grounds in an English
garden and the culture of fruit trees. "I will not enter upon any
account of flowers," he says, "having only pleased myself with the care,
which is more the ladies' part than the men's,[23] but the success is
wholly in the gardener."
[Footnote 23: This remark of Temple's as to the small importance the
flower-beds had in the mind of the gardener of his day, is significant:
as indicating the different methods employed by the ancient and modern
gardener. It was not that he was not "pleased with the care" of flowers,
but that these were not his chiefest care; his prime idea was to get
broad, massive, well-defined effects in his garden generally. Hence the
monumental style of the old-fashioned garden, the carefully-disposed
ground, the formality, the well-considered poise and counter-poise, the
varying levels and well-defined parts. And only inwoven, as it were,
into the argument of the piece, are its pretty parts, used much as the
jewellery of a fair woman. I should be sorry to be so unjust to the
modern landscape gardener as to accuse him of caring over-much for
flowers, but of his garden-device generally one may fairly say it has no
monumental style, no ordered shape other than its carefully-schemed
_disorder_. It is not a masculine affair, but effeminate and niggling; a
little park-scenery, curved shrubberies, wriggling paths, emphasised
specimen plants, and flower-beds of more or less inane shape tumbled
down on the skirts of the lawn or drive, that do more harm than good to
the effect of the place, seen near or at a distance. How true it is that
to believe in Art one must be an artist!]
And Bacon is not so wholly enamoured of Arcadia and with the embodiment
of far-brought fancies in his "prince-like" garden as to be callous of
Nature's share therein. "The contents ought not well to be under thirty
acres of ground, and to be divided into three parts; a green in the
entrance, a heath or desert in the going forth, and the main garden in
the midst, besides alleys on both sides; and I like well that four acres
be assigned to the Green, six to the Heath, four and four to either
side, and twelve to the main Garden. The Green hath two pleasures: the
one, because nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green grass kept
finely shorn; the other, because it will give you a fair alley in the
midst, by which you may go in front upon a stately hedge, which is to
enclose the garden." "For the heath, which was the third part of our
plot, I wished it be framed as much as may be to a natural wildness,"
&c. Of which more anon.[24]
[Footnote 24: Nonsuch had its wilderness of ten acres.]
Whether the garden of Bacon's essay is the portrait of an actual thing,
whether the writer--to use a phrase of Wordsworth--"had his eye upon the
subject," or whether it was built in the man's brain like Tennyson's
"Palace of Art," we cannot tell. From the singular air of experience
that animates the description, the sure touch of the writer, we may
infer that Gorhambury had some such garden, the fruit of its master's
"Leisure with honour," or "Leisure without honour," as the case may be.
But what seems certain is, that the essay is only a sign of the ordinary
English gentleman's mind on the subject at that time; and in giving us
this masterpiece, Bacon had no more notion of posing as the founder of
the English garden (_pace_ Brown) than of getting himself labelled as
the founder of Modern Science for his distinguished labours in that
line. "I only sound the clarion," he says, "but I enter not into the
battle."
Moderns are pleased to smile at what they deem the over-subtilty of
Bacon's ideal garden. For my own part, I find nothing recommended there
that a "princely garden" should not fitly contain (especially as these
things are all of a-piece with the device of the period), even to those
imagination-stirring features which one thinks he may have described,
not from the life, but from the figures in "The Dream of Poliphilus" (a
book of woodcuts published in Venice, 1499), features of the Enchanted
Island, to wit the two fountains--the first to spout water, to be
adorned with ornaments of images, gilt or of marble; the "other, which
we may call a bathing-pool that admits of much curiosity and beauty
wherewith we will not trouble ourselves; as that the bottom be finely
paved with images, the sides likewise; and withal embellished with
coloured glass, and such things of lustre; encompassed also with fine
rails of low statues."[25]
[Footnote 25: _Nineteenth Century Magazine_, July, 1890.]
No artist is disposed to apologise for the presence of subtilty in Art,
nor I for the subtle device of Bacon's garden. All Art is cunning. Yet
we must not simply note the deep intent of the old master, but must
equally recognise the air of gravity that pervades his
recommendations--the sweet reasonableness of suggestions for design
that have as much regard for the veracities of Nature, and the dictates
of common-sense, as for the nice elegancies and well-calculated
audacities of consummate Art.
"I only sound the clarion, but I enter not into the battle." Even so,
Master! we will hold thy hand as far as thou wilt go; and the clarion
thou soundest right well, and most serviceably for all future gardeners!
I like the ring of stout challenge in the opening words, which command
respect for the subject, and, if rightly construed, should make the
heretic "landscape gardener,"--who dotes on meagre country-grass and
gipsy scenery--pause in his denunciation of Art in a garden. "God
almighty first planted a Garden; and indeed it is the purest of humane
pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the Spirits of man, without
which Buildings and Palaces are but gross Handyworks. And a man shall
ever see, that when ages grow to Civility and Elegancy, men come to
build stately sooner than to garden finely: as if Gardening were the
Greater Perfection."
This first paragraph has, for me, something of the stately tramp and
pregnant meaning of the opening phrase of "At a Solemn Music." The
praise of gardening can no further go. To say more were impossible. To
say less were to belittle your subject. I think of Ben Jonson's simile,
"They jump farthest who fetch their race largest." For Bacon "fetches"
his subject back to "In the beginning," and prophesies of all time.
Thus does he lift his theme to its full height at starting, and the
remainder holds to the same heroic measure.
If the ideal garden be fanciful, it is also grand and impressive. Nor
could it well be otherwise. For when the essay was written fine
gardening was in the air, and the master had special opportunities for
studying and enjoying great gardens. More than this, Bacon was an apt
craftsman in many fields, a born artist, gifted with an imagination at
once rich and curious, whose performances of every sort declare the
student's love of form, and the artist's nice discrimination of
expression. Then, too, his mind was set upon the conquest of Nature, of
which gardening is a province, for the service of man, for physical
enjoyment, and for the increase of social comfort. Yet was he an
Englishman first, and a fine gardener afterwards. Admit the author's
sense of the delights of art-magic in a garden, none esteemed them more,
yet own the discreet economy of his imaginative strokes, the homely
bluntness of his criticisms upon foreign vagaries, the English
sane-mindedness of his points, his feeling for broad effects and dislike
of niggling, the mingled shrewdness and benignity of his way of putting
things. It is just because Bacon thus treats of idealisms as though they
were realisms, because he so skilfully wraps up his fanciful figures in
matter-of-fact language that even the ordinary English reader
appreciates the art of Bacon's stiff garden, and entertains
art-aspirations unawares.
Every reader of Bacon will recognise what I wish to point out. Here,
however, are a few examples:--
"For the ordering of the Ground within the Great Hedge, I leave it to a
Variety of Device. Advising, nevertheless, that whatsoever form you cast
it into; first it be not too busie, or full of work; wherein I, for my
part, do not like Images cut out in Juniper, or other garden stuffs;
_they are for Children_. Little low Hedges, round like Welts, with some
pretty Pyramids, I like well; and in some places Fair Columns upon
Frames of Carpenters' work. I would also have the Alleys spacious and
fair."
"As for the making of Knots or Figures, with Divers Coloured earths,
that they may lie under the windows of the House, on that side which the
Garden stands, _they be but Toys, you may see as good sights many
times in Tarts_."
"For Fountains, they are a Great Beauty and Refreshment, _but Pools mar
all, and make the Garden unwholesome and full of flies and frogs_."
"For fine Devices, of arching water without spilling, and making it rise
in several forms (of Feathers, Drinking Glasses, Canopies, and the like)
(see "The Dream of Poliphilus") _they be pretty things to look on, but
nothing to Health and Sweetness_."
Thus throughout the Essay, with alternate rise and fall, do fancy and
judgment deliver themselves of charge and retort, making a kind of
logical see-saw. At the onset Fancy kicks the beam; at the middle,
Judgment is in the ascendant, and before the sentence is done the
balance rides easy. And this scrupulousness is not to be wholly
ascribed to the fastidious bent of a mind that lived in a labyrinth; it
speaks equally of the fineness of the man's ideal, which lifts his
standard sky-high and keeps him watchful to a fault in attaining desired
effects without running upon "trifles and jingles." The master-text of
the whole Essay seems to be the writer's own apothegm: "Nature is
commanded by obeying her."
That a true gardener should love Nature goes without saying. And Bacon
loved Nature passionately, and gardens only too well. He tells us these
were his favourite sins in the strange document--half prayer, half
Apologia--written after he had made his will, at the time of his fall,
when he presumably concluded that _anything_ might happen. "Thy
creatures have been my books, but Thy Scriptures much more. I have
sought Thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found Thee in
Thy temples."
Three more points about the essay I would like to comment upon. First,
That in spite of its lofty dreaming, it treats of the hard and dry side
of gardening as a science in so methodical a manner that but for what it
contains besides, and for its mint-mark of a great spirit, the thing
might pass as an extract from a more-than-ordinary practical gardener's
manual. Bacon does not write upon the subject like a man in another
planet, but like a man in a land of living men.
Secondly, As to the attitude of Bacon and his school towards external
Nature. In them is no trace of the mawkish sentimentality of the modern
"landscape-gardener," proud of his discoveries, bustling to show how
condescending he can be towards Nature, how susceptible to a pastoral
melancholy. There is nothing here of the maundering of Shenstone over
his ideal landscape-garden that reads as though it would be a superior
sort of pedants' Cremorne, where "the lover's walk may have assignation
seats, with proper mottoes, urns to faithful lovers, trophies, garlands,
etc., by means of Art"; and where due consideration is to be given to
"certain complexions of soul that will prefer an orange tree or a myrtle
to an oak or cedar." The older men thought first of the effects that
they wished to attain, and proceeded to realise them without more ado.
They had no "codes of taste" to appeal to, and no literary law-givers to
stand in dread of. They applied Nature's raw materials as their art
required. And yet, compared with the methods of the heavy-handed realist
of later times such unscrupulousness had a merit of its own. To suit
their purposes the old gardeners may have defied Nature's ways and wont;
but, even so, they act as fine gentlemen should: they never pet and
patronise her: they have no blunt and blundering methods such as mark
the Nature-maulers of the Brown or Batty-Langley school: if they cut,
they do not mince, nor hack, nor tear, they cut clean. In one's better
moments one can almost sympathise with the "landscape-gardener's"
feelings as he reads, if he ever does read, Evelyn's classic book
"Sylva; or, a Discourse of Forest-trees," how they trimmed the hedges
of hornbeam, "than which there is nothing more graceful," and the cradle
or close-walk with that perplext canopy which lately covered the seat in
his Majesty's garden at Hampton Court, and how the tonsile hedges,
fifteen or twenty feet high, are to be cut and kept in order "with a
scythe of four feet long, and very little falcated; this is fixed on a
long sneed or straight handle, and _does wonderfully expedite the
trimming of these and the like hedges_."
Thirdly, Bacon's essay tells us all that an English garden _can_ be, or
_may_ be. Bacon writes not for his age alone but for all time; nay, his
essay covers so much ground that the legion of after-writers have only
to pick up the crumbs that fall from this rich man's table, and to
amplify the two hundred and sixty lines of condensed wisdom that it
contains. Its category of effects reaches even the free-and-easy
planting of the skirts of our dressed grounds, with flowers and shrubs
set in the turf "framed as much as may be to a natural wildness"--a
pretty trick of compromise which the modern book-writers would have us
believe they invented themselves.
On one point the modern garden has the advantage and is bound to excel
the old, namely in its employment of foreign trees and shrubs. The
decorative use of "trees of curiosity," as the foreign trees were then
called, and the employment of variegated foliage, was not unknown to the
gardener of early days, but it was long before foreign plants were
introduced to any great extent. Loudon has taken the trouble to reckon
up the number of specimens that came to England century by century, and
we gather from this that the imports of modern times exceed those of
earlier times to an enormous extent. Thus, he computes that only 131 new
specimens of foreign trees were introduced into England in the
seventeenth century as against 445 in the following century.
Yet, to follow up this interesting point, we may observe that Heutzner,
writing of English gardens in 1598, specially notes "the great variety
of trees and plants at Theobalds."
Furthermore, to judge by Worlidge's "Systema Horticulturae" (1677) it
would seem that the practice of variegating, and of combining the
variegated foliage of plants and shrubs, was in existence at that time.
"Dr Uvedale, of Enfield, is a great lover of plants," says Gibson,
writing in 1691, "and is become master of the greatest and choicest
collection of exotic greens that is perhaps anywhere in this land....
His flowers are choice, his stock numerous, and his culture of them very
methodical and curious; but to speak of the garden in the whole, it does
not lie fine to please the eye, his delight and care lying more in the
ordering particular plants, than in the pleasing view and form of his
garden."
"_Darby_, at _Hoxton_, has but a little garden, but is master of several
curious greens.... His Fritalaria Crassa (a green) had a flower on it of
the breadth of half-a-crown, like an embroidered star of many
colours.... He raises many striped hollies by inoculation," &c.
("Gleanings in Old Garden Literature," Hazlitt, p. 240.)
And yet one last observation I would like to make, remembering Bacon's
subtilty, and how his every utterance is the sum of matured analytical
thought. This yearning for wild nature that makes itself felt all
through the Essay, this scheme for a "natural wildness" touching the hem
of artificiality; this provision for mounts of some pretty height "to
look abroad in the fields"; this care for the "Heath or Desart in the
going forth, planted not in any order;" the "little Heaps in the Nature
of Molehills (such as are in wild Heaths) to be set with pleasant herbs,
wild thyme, pinks, periwinkle, and the like Low Flowers being withall
sweet and sightly"--what does it imply? Primarily, it declares the
artist who knows the value of contrast, the interest of blended
contrariness; it is the cultured man's hankering after a many-faced
Nature readily accessible to him in his many moods; it tells, too, of
the drift of the Englishman towards familiar landscape effects, the
garden-mimicry which sets towards pastoral Nature; but above and beyond
all else, it is a true Baconian stroke. Is not the man's innermost self
here revealed, who in his eagerest moments struggled for detachment of
mind, held his will in leash according to his own astute maxim "not to
engage oneself too peremptorily in anything, but ever to have either a
window open to fly out of, or a secret way to retire by"? In a sense,
the garden's technique illustrates its author's personality. To change
Montaigne's reply to the king who admired his essays, Bacon might say,
"I am my garden."
Many references to old garden-craft might be given culled from the
writings of Sir Thomas More, John Lyly, Gawen Douglas, John Gerarde, Sir
Philip Sidney, and others; all of whom are quoted in Mr Sieveking's
charming volume, "The praise of Gardens." But none will serve our
purpose so well as the notes of Heutzner, the German traveller, who
visited England in the 16th century, and Sir William Temple's
description of the garden of Moor Park. According to Heutzner, the
gardens at Theobalds, Nonsuch, Whitehall, Hampton Court, and Oxford were
laid out with considerable taste and extensively ornamented with
architectural and other devices. The Palace at Nonsuch is encompassed
with parks full of deer, with delicious gardens, groves ornamented with
trellis-work, cabinets of verdure, and walks enclosed with trees. "In
the pleasure and artificial gardens are many columns and pyramids of
marble, two fountains that spout water one round the other like a
pyramid, upon which are perched small birds that stream water out of
their bills. In the grove of Diana is a very agreeable fountain, with
Actaeon turned into a stag, as he was sprinkled by the goddess and her
nymphs, with inscriptions." Theobalds, according to Heutzner's account,
has a "great variety of trees and plants," labyrinths, fountains of
white marble, a summerhouse, and statuary. The gardens had their
terraces, trellis-walks, and bowling-greens, the beds being laid out in
geometrical lines, and the hedges formed of yews, hollies, and limes,
clipped and shaped into cones, pyramids, and other devices. Among the
delights of Nonsuch was a wilderness of ten acres of extent. Of Hampton
Court, he says: "We saw rosemary so planted and nailed to the walls as
to cover them entirely, which is a method exceeding common in England."
No book on English gardens can afford to dispense with Temple's
description of the garden of Moor Park, which is given with considerable
relish, as though it satisfied the ideal of the writer.
"The perfectest figure of a Garden I ever saw, either at Home or
Abroad."--"It lies on the side of a Hill (upon which the House
stands), but not very steep. The length of the House, where the
best Rooms and of most Use or Pleasure are, lies upon the Breadth
of the Garden, the Great Parlour opens into the Middle of a Terras
Gravel-Walk that lies even with it, and which may be, as I
remember, about 300 Paces long, and broad in Proportion, the Border
set with Standard Laurels, and at large Distances, which have the
beauty of Orange-Trees, out of Flower and Fruit: From this Walk are
Three Descents by many Stone Steps, in the Middle and at each End,
into a very large Parterre. This is divided into Quarters by
Gravel-Walks, and adorned with Two Fountains and Eight Statues in
the several Quarters; at the End of the Terras-Walk are Two
Summer-Houses, and the Sides of the Parterre are ranged with two
large Cloisters, open to the Garden, upon Arches of Stone, and
ending with two other Summer-Houses even with the Cloisters, which
are paved with Stone, and designed for Walks of Shade, there are
none other in the whole Parterre. Over these two Cloisters are two
Terrasses covered with Lead and fenced with Balusters; and the
Passage into these Airy Walks, is out of the two Summer-Houses, at
the End of the first Terras-Walk. The Cloister facing the _South_
is covered with Vines, and would have been proper for an
Orange-House, and the other for Myrtles, or other more common
Greens; and had, I doubt not, been cast for that Purpose, if this
Piece of Gardening had been then in as much Vogue as it is now.
"From the middle of this Parterre is a Descent by many Steps flying
on each Side of a Grotto, that lies between them (covered with
Lead, and flat) into the lower Garden, which is all Fruit-Trees
ranged about the several Quarters of a Wilderness, which is very
Shady; the Walks here are all Green, the Grotto embellished with
Figures of Shell-Rock work, Fountains, and Water-works. If the Hill
had not ended with the lower Garden, and the Wall were not bounded
by a Common Way that goes through the Park, they might have added a
Third Quarter of all Greens; but this Want is supplied by a Garden
on the other Side of the House, which is all of that Sort, very
Wild, Shady, and adorned with rough Rock-work and Fountains."
("Upon the Garden of Epicurus, or of Gardening.")
The "Systema Horticulturae" of John Worlidge (1677) was, says Mr Hazlitt
("Gleanings in old Garden Literature," p. 40), apparently the earliest
manual for the guidance of gardeners. It deals with technical matters,
such as the treatment and virtue of different soils, the form of the
ground, the structure of walls and fences, the erection of arbours,
summer-houses, fountains, grottoes, obelisks, dials, &c.
"The Scots Gardener," by John Reid (1683) follows this, and is, says Mr
Hazlitt, the parent-production in this class of literature. It is
divided into two portions, of which the first is occupied by technical
instructions for the choice of a site for a garden, the arrangement of
beds and walks, &c.
Crispin de Passe's "Book of Beasts, Birds, Flowers, Fruits, &c.,"
published in London (1630), heralds the changes which set in with the
introduction of the Dutch school of design.
To speak generally of the subject, it is with the art of Gardening as
with Architecture, Literature, and Music--there is the Mediaeval, the
Elizabethan, the Jacobean, the Georgian types. Each and all are
English, but English with a difference--with a declared tendency this
way or that, which justifies classification, and illustrates the march
of things in this changeful modern world.
The various types include the mediaeval garden, the square garden, the
knots and figures of Elizabethan times, with their occasional use of
coloured earths and gravels; the pleach-work and intricate borders of
James I.; the painted Dutch statues as at Ham House; the quaint canals,
the winding gravel-walks, the formal geometrical figures; the quincunx
and _etoile_ of William and Mary; later on, the smooth, bare, and bald
grounds of Kent, the photographic copyism of Nature by Brown, the
garden-farm of Shenstone, and other phases of the "Landscape style"
which served for the green grave of the old-fashioned English garden.
In the early years of George III. a reaction against tradition set in
with so strong a current, that there remains scarcely any private garden
in the United Kingdom which presents in all its parts a sample of the
original design.
Levens, near Kendal, of which I give two illustrations, is probably the
least spoiled of any remaining examples; and this was, it would seem,
planned by a Frenchman, but worked out under the restraining influences
of English taste. A picture on the staircase of the house, apparently
Dutch, bears the inscription, "M. Beaumont, gardener to King James II.
and Colonel James Grahme. He laid out the gardens at Hampton Court and
at Levens." The gardener's house at the place is still called "Beaumont
Hall." (See an admirable monograph upon "Col. James Grahme, of Levens,"
by Mr Joscelin Bagot, Kendal.)
One who is perhaps hardly in sympathy with the quaintness of the
gardens, thus writes: "There along a wide extent of terraced walks and
walls, eagles of holly and peacocks of yew still find with each
returning summer their wings clipt and their talons; there a stately
remnant of the old promenoirs such as the Frenchman taught our
fathers,[26] rather I would say to _build_ than plant--along which in
days of old stalked the gentlemen with periwigs and swords, the ladies
in hoops and furbelows--may still to this day be seen."
[Footnote 26: With regard to this remark, we have to note a certain
amount of French influence throughout the reigns of the Jameses and
Charleses. Here is Beaumont, "gardener to James II.;" and we hear also
of Andre Mollet, gardener to James I.; also that Charles II. borrowed Le
Notre to lay out the gardens of Greenwich and St James' Park.]
With the pictures of the gardens at Levens before us, with memories of
Arley, of Brympton, of Wilton,[27] of Montacute, Rockingham, Penshurst,
Severn End, Berkeley,[28] and Haddon, we may here pause a moment to
count up and bewail our losses. Wolsey's garden at Hampton Court is now
effaced, for the design of the existing grounds dates from William III.
Nonsuch in Surrey, near Epsom race-course, is a mere memory. In old days
this was a favourite resort of Queen Elizabeth; the garden was designed
by her father, but the greater part carried out by the last of the
Fitzalans. Evelyn, writing of Nonsuch, says: "There stand in the garden
two handsome stone pyramids and the avenue planted with rows of fair
elms, but the rest of these goodly trees, both of this and of Worcester
adjoining, were felled by those destructive and avaricious rebels in the
late war."
[Footnote 27: The gardens at Wilton are exceedingly beautiful, and
contain noble trees, among which are a group of fine cedars and an ilex
beneath which Sir Philip Sidney is supposed to have reclined when he
wrote his "Arcadia" here. The Italian garden is one of the most
beautiful in England.]
[Footnote 28: Of Berkeley, Evelyn writes: "For the rest the forecourt is
noble, so are the stables; and, above all, the gardens, which are
incomparable by reason of the inequality of the ground, and a pretty
_piscina_. The holly-hedges on the terrace I advised the planting of."]
Theobalds, in Hertfordshire, had a noble garden; it was bought in 1564
by Cecil, and became the favourite haunt of the Stuarts, but the house
was finally destroyed during the Commonwealth.
My Lord _Fauconbergh's_ garden at _Sutton Court_ is gone too. As
described by Gibson in 1691, it had many charms. "The maze, or
wilderness, there is very pretty, being set all with greens, with a
cypress arbour in the middle," &c.
Sir _Henry Capell's_ garden at Kew, described by the same writer, "has
as curious greens, and is as well kept as any about London.... His
orange trees and other choice greens stand out in summer in two walks
about fourteen feet wide, enclosed with a timber frame about seven feet
high, and set with silver firs hedge-wise.... His terrace walk, bare in
the middle and grass on either side, with a hedge of rue on one side
next a low wall, and a row of dwarf trees on the other, shews very
fine; and so do from thence his yew hedges with trees of the same at
equal distance, kept in pretty shapes with tonsure. His flowers and
fruits are of the best, for the advantage of which two parallel walls,
about fourteen feet high, were now raised and almost finished," &c.
Sir _Stephen Fox's_ garden at _Chiswick_, "excels for a fair gravel walk
betwixt two yew hedges, with rounds and spires of the same, all under
smooth tonsure. At the far end of this garden are two myrtle hedges that
cross the garden. The other gardens are full of flowers and salleting,
and the walls well clad."
Wimbledon House, which was rebuilt by Sir Thomas Cecil in 1588, and
surveyed by order of Parliament in 1649, was celebrated for its trees,
gardens, and shrubs. In the several gardens, which consisted of mazes,
wildernesses, knots, alleys, &c., are mentioned a great variety of fruit
trees and shrubs, particularly a "faire bay tree," valued at L1; and
"one very faire tree called the Irish arbutis, very lovely to look upon
and worth L1, 10s." (Lysons, I., 397.)
The gardens at Sherborne Castle were laid out by Sir Walter Raleigh.
Coker, in his "Survey of Dorsetshire," written in the time of James I.,
says that Sir Walter built in the park adjoining the old Castle, "a most
fine house which hee beautified with orchardes, gardens, and groves of
much varietie and great delight; soe that whether that you consider the
pleasantness of the seate, the goodnesse of the soyle, or the other
delicacies belonging unto it, it rests unparalleled by anie in those
partes" (p. 124). This same park, magnificently embellished with woods
and gardens, was "improved" away by the "landscape-gardener" Brown, who
altered the grounds.
Cobham, near Gravesend, still famous in horticultural annals as Nonsuch
is for its apples, was the seat of the Brookes. The extent to which
fruit was cultivated in old time is seen by the magnitude of the
orangery at Beddington House, Surrey, which was two hundred feet long;
the trees mostly measured thirteen feet high, and in 1690 some ten
thousand oranges were gathered.
Ham is described with much gusto by Evelyn: "After dinner I walked to
Ham to see the house and garden of the Duke of Lauderdale, which is
indeed inferior to few of the best villas in Italy itself; the house
furnished like a great Prince's, the parterres, flower-gardens,
orangeries, groves, avenues, courts, statues, perspectives, fountains,
aviaries, and all this at the banks of the sweetest river in the world,
must needs be admirable."
Bowyer House, Surrey, is described also by Evelyn as having a very
pretty grove of oaks and hedges of yew in the garden, and a handsome row
of tall elms before the court. This garden has, however, made way for
rows of mean houses.
At Oxford, where you would have expected more respect for antiquity, the
walks and alleys, along which Laud had conducted Charles and Henrietta,
the bowling-green at Christ Church of Cranmer's time--all are gone.
The ruthless clearance of these gardens of renown is sad to relate: "For
what sin has the plough passed over your pleasant places?" may be
demanded of numberless cases besides Blakesmoor. Southey, writing upon
this very point, adds that "feeling is a better thing than taste,"--for
"taste" did it at the bidding of critics who had no "feeling," and who
veered round with the first sign of change in the public mind about
gardening. Not content with watching the heroic gardens swept away, he
must goad the Vandals on to their sorry work by flattering them for
their good taste. For what Horace Walpole did to expose the
poverty-stricken design and all the poor bankrupt whimsies of the garden
of his day, we owe him thanks; but not for including in his condemnation
the noble work of older days. In touching upon Lord Burleigh's garden,
and that at Nonsuch, he says: "We find the _magnificent though false
taste_ was known here as early as the reigns of Henry VIII. and his
daughter." This is not bad, coming from the man who built a cockney
Gothic house adorned with piecrust battlements and lath-and-plaster
pinnacles; who spent much of his life in concocting a maze of walks in
five acres of ground, and was so far carried away by mock-rustic
sentiment as to have rakes and hay-forks painted as leaning against the
walls of his paddocks! But then Walpole, in his polished way, sneered
at everybody and everything; he "spelt every man backward," as Macaulay
observes; with himself he lived in eminent self-content.
So too, after quoting Temple's description of the garden at Moor Park
with the master's little rhapsody--"the sweetest place I think that I
have seen in my life, either before or since, at home or
abroad"--Walpole has this icy sneer: "Any man might design and _build_
as sweet a garden who had been born in and never stirred out of Holborn.
It was not peculiar in Sir William Temple to think in that manner."
It is not wise, however, to lay too much stress upon criticisms of this
sort. After all, any phase of Art does but express the mind of its day,
and it cannot do duty for the mind of another time. "The old order
changeth, yielding place to new," and to take a critical attitude
towards the forms of an older day is almost a necessity of the case;
they soon become curiosities. Yet we may fairly regret the want of
tenderness in dealing with these gardens of the Elizabethan and Jacobean
eras, for, by all the laws of human expression, they should be
masterpieces. The ground-chord of the garden-enterprise of those days
was struck by Bacon, who rates buildings and palaces, be they never so
princely, as "but gross handiworks" where no garden is: "Men come to
build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the
Greater Perfection"--the truth of which saying is only too glaringly
apparent in the relative conditions of the arts of architecture and of
gardening in the present day!
By all the laws of human expression, I say, these old gardens should be
masterpieces. The sixteenth century, which saw the English garden
formulated, was a time for grand enterprises; indeed, to this period is
ascribed the making of England. These gardens, then, are the handiwork
of the makers of England, and should bear the marks of heroes. They are
relics of the men and women who made our land both fine and famous in
the days of the Tudors; they represent the mellow fruit of the leisure,
the poetic reverie, the patient craft of men versed in great
affairs--big men, who thought and did big things--men of splendid genius
and stately notions--past-masters of the art of life who would drink
life to the lees.
As gardeners, these old statesmen were no dabblers. They had the good
fortune to live in a current of ideas of formal device that touched art
at all points and was well calculated to assist the creative faculty in
design of all kinds. They lived before the art of bad gardening had been
invented; before pretty thoughts had palled the taste, before gardening
had learnt routine; while Nature smiled a virgin smile and had a sense
of unsolved mystery. More than this, garden-craft was then no mere craze
or passing freak of fashion, but a serious item in the round of
home-life; --gardening was a thing to be done as well as it could be
done. Design was fresh and open to individual treatment--men needed an
outlet for their love of, their elation at, the sight of beautiful
things, and behind them lay the background of far-reaching traditions to
encourage, inspire, protect experiment with the friendly shadow of
authority.
An accomplished French writer has remarked that even the modest work of
Art may contain occasion for long processes of analysis. "Very great
laws," he says, "may be illustrated in a very small compass." And so one
thinks it is with the ancient garden. Looked at as a piece of design, it
is the blossom of English genius at one of its sunniest moments. It is a
bit of the history of our land. It embodies the characteristics of the
mediaeval, the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages just as faithfully as do
other phases of contemporary art. It contains the same principle of
beauty, the same sense of form, that animated these; it has the same
curious turns of expression, the same mixture of pedantry and subtle
sweetness; the same wistful daring and humorous sadness; the same
embroidery of nice fancy--half jocund, half grave, as--shall we
say--Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Spenser's "Faerie Queene,"
Milton's "Comus," More's "Utopia," Bacon's Essays, Purcell's Madrigals,
John Thorpe's architecture at Longleat. The same spirit, the same wit
and fancy resides in each; they differ only in the medium of expression.
To condemn old English gardening, root and branch, for its "false taste"
(and it was not peculiar to Walpole to think in that manner), was, in
truth, to indict our nation on a line of device wherein we excelled,
and to condemn device that represents the inspired dreams of some of
England's elect sons.
To our sorry groundling minds the old pleasaunce may seem too rich and
fantastic, too spectacular, too much idealised. And if to be English one
must needs be _bourgeois_, the objection must stand. Here is developed
garden-craft, and development almost invariably means multiplicity of
forms and a marked departure from primaeval simplicity. Grant, if you
will, that Art is carried too far, and Nature not carried far enough in
the old garden, yet did it deserve better treatment. Judged both from
its human and its artistic side, the place is as loveable as it is
pathetic. It has the pathos of all art that survives its creators, the
pathos of all abandoned human idols, of all high human endeavour that is
blown upon. What is more, it holds, as it were, the spent passion of men
of Utopian dreams, the ideal (in one kind) of the spoiled children of
culture, the knight-errantry of the Renascence--whose imagination soared
after illimitable satisfaction, who were avowedly bent upon transforming
the brazen of this world into the golden, to whom desire was but the
first step to attainment, and failure an unknown experience.
But even yet some may demur that the interest of the antique garden, as
we see it, is due to Nature direct, and not to art-agencies. It is
Nature who gives it its artistic qualities of gradation, contrast, play
of form and colour, the flicker of sunshine through the foliage, the
shadows on the grass--not the master who begot the thing, for has he
not been dead, and his vacant orbits choked with clay these two hundred
years and more! To him, of course, may be ascribed the primal thought of
the place, and, say, some fifty years of active participation in its
ordering and culture, but for the rest--for its poetic excitement, for
its yearly accesses of beauty--are they not to be credited in full to
the lenience of Time and the generous operations of Nature?
Grant all that should rightly be granted to the disaffected grumbler,
and yet, in Mr Lowell's words for another, yet a parallel case, I plead
that "Poets are always entitled to a royalty on whatever we find in
their works; for these fine creations as truly build themselves up in
the brain as they are built up with deliberate thought." If a garden
owed none of its characteristics to its maker, if it had not expressed
the mind of its designer, why the essential differences of the garden of
this style and of that! Properly speaking, the music of all gardens is
framed out of the same simple gamut of Nature's notes--it is but one
music poured from myriad lips--yet out of the use of the same raw
elements what a variety of tunes can be made, each tune complete in
itself! And it is because we may identify the maker in his work;
because, like the unfinished air, abruptly brought to a close at the
master's death, the place is much as it was first schemed, one is
jealous for the honour of the man whose eye prophesied its ultimate
magic even as he initiated its plan, and drafted its lines.
Many an English house has been hopelessly vulgarised and beggared by
the banishment of the old pleasaunces of the days of Elizabeth, or of
the Jameses and Charleses, and their wholesale demolition there and then
struck a blow at English gardening from which it has not yet recovered.
It may be admitted that, in the case of an individual garden here and
there, the violation of these relics may be condoned on the heathen
principle of tit for tat, because Art had, in the first instance, so to
speak, turned her back on some fair landscape that Providence had
provided upon the site, preferring to focus man's eye _within_ rather
than _without_ the garden's bounds, therefore the vengeance is merited.
Yet, where change was desirable, it had been better to modify than to
destroy.
"Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight,
And burned is Apollo's laurel bough."
Certain it is that along with the girdle of high hedge or wall has gone
that air of inviting mystery and homely reserve that our forefathers
loved, and which is to me one of the pleasantest traits of an old
English garden, best described as
"A haunt of ancient peace."
CHAPTER V.
THE "LANDSCAPE-GARDEN."
"'Pealing from Jove to Nature's bar
Bold Alteration pleades
Large evidence; but Nature soon
Her righteous doom areads."--SPENSER.
Why were the old-fashioned gardens destroyed? Firstly, because the
traditional garden of the early part of the eighteenth century, when the
reaction set in, represented a style which had run to seed, and men were
tired of it; secondly, because the taste for foreign trees and shrubs,
that had existed for a long time previously, then came to a head, and it
was found that the old type of garden was not fitted for the display of
the augmented stock of foreign material. Here was a new element in
garden-craft, a new chance of decoration in the way of local colours in
planting, which required a new adjustment of garden-effects; and as
there was some difficulty in accommodating the new and the old, the
problem was met by the abolition of the old altogether.
As to this matter of the sudden increase of specimen plants, Loudon
remarks that in the earlier century the taste for foreign plants was
confined to a few, and they not wealthy persons; but in the eighteenth
century the taste for planting foreign trees extended itself among rich
landed proprietors. A host of amateurs, botanists, and commercial
gardeners were busily engaged in enriching the British Arboretum, and
the garden-grounds had to be arranged for new effects and a new mode of
culture. In Loudon's "Arboretum" (p. 126) is a list of the species of
foreign trees and shrubs introduced into England up to the year 1830. He
calculates that the total number of specimens up to the time that he
wrote was about 1400, but the numbers taken by centuries are: in the
sixteenth century, 89; in the seventeenth century, 131; in the
eighteenth century, 445; and in the first three decades of the
nineteenth century, 699!
Men stubbed up the old gardens because they had grown tired of their
familiar types, as they tire of other familiar things. The eighteenth
century was essentially a critical age, an age of enquiry, and
gardening, along with art, morals, and religion, came in for its share
of coffee-house discussion, and elaborate essay-writing, and nothing was
considered satisfactory. As to gardening, it was not natural enough for
the critics. The works of Salvator and Poussin had pictured the grand
and terrible in scenery, Thomson was writing naturalistic poetry,
Rousseau naturalistic prose. Garden-ornament was too classical and
formal for the varnished _litterateur_ of the _Spectator_ and the
_Guardian_--too symmetrical for the jingling rhymester of a sing-song
generation--too artificial for the essayist "'Pealing from Jove to
Nature's bar," albeit he is privately content to go on touching up his
groves and grottoes at Twickenham, securing the services of a peer
"To form his quincunx, and to rank his vines."
Gardens are looked upon as so much "copy" to the essayist. What affected
tastes have these critics! What a confession of counterfeit love, of
selfish literary interest in gardens is this of Addison's: "I think
there are as many kinds of gardening as of poetry. Your makers of
parterres and flower-gardens are epigrammatists and sonneteers in this
art; contrivers of bowers and grottoes, treillages and cascades, are
romance writers." How beside nature, beside garden-craft, are such
pen-man's whimsies! "Nothing to the true pleasure of a garden," Bacon
would say.
Walpole's essay on gardening is entertaining reading, and his book gives
us glimpses of the country-seats of all the great ladies and gentlemen
who had the good fortune to be his acquaintances. His condemnation of
the geometrical style of gardening common in his day, though quieter in
tone than Pope's, was none the less effective in promoting a change of
style. He tells how in Kip's views of the seats of our nobility we have
the same "tiring and returning uniformity." Every house is approached by
two or three gardens, consisting perhaps of a gravel-walk and two grass
plats or borders of flowers. "Each rises above the other by two or
three steps, and as many walks and terrasses; and so many iron gates,
that we recollect those ancient romances in which every entrance was
guarded by nymphs or dragons. At Lady Orford's, at Piddletown, in
Dorsetshire, there was, when my brother married, a double enclosure of
thirteen gardens, each, I suppose, not a hundred yards square, with an
enfilade of correspondent gates; and before you arrived at these, you
passed a narrow gut between two terrasses that rose above your head, and
which were crowned by a line of pyramidal yews. A bowling-green was all
the lawn admitted in those times, a circular lake the extent of
magnificence."
Such an air of truth and soberness pervades Walpole's narrative, and to
so absurd an extent has formality been manifestly carried under the
auspices of Loudon and Wise, who had stocked our gardens with "giants,
animals, monsters, coats of arms, mottoes in yew, box, and holly," that
we are almost persuaded to be Vandals. "The compass and square, were of
more use in plantations than the nursery-man. The measured walk, the
quincunx, and the etoile imposed their unsatisfying sameness.... Trees
were headed, and their sides pared away; many French groves seem green
chests set upon poles. Seats of marble, arbours, and summer-houses,
terminated every vista." It is all very well for Temple to recommend the
regular form of garden. "I should hardly advise any of these attempts"
cited by Walpole, "in the form of gardens among us; _they are adventures
of too hard achievement for any common hands_." The truth will out! The
"dainter sense" of garden-craft has vanished! According to Walpole,
garden-adventure is to be henceforth journeyman's work, and Brown, the
immortal kitchen-gardener, leads the way.
It were unfair to suspect that the exigencies of sprightly writing had
carried Walpole beyond the bounds of accuracy in his description of the
stiff-garden as he knew it, for things were in some respects very bad
indeed. At the same time he is so engrossed with his abuse of old ways
of gardening, and advocacy of the landscape-gardener's new-fangled
notions, that his account of garden-craft generally falls short of
completeness. He omits, for instance, to notice the progress in
floriculture and horticulture of this time, the acquisitions being made
in the ornamental foreign plants to be cultivated in the open ground,
the green-house, and the stove. He omits to note that Loudon and Wise
stocked our gardens with more than giants, animals, monsters, &c., in
yew and box and holly. Because the names of these two worthies occur in
this gardening text-book of Walpole's, all later essayists signal them
out for blame. But Evelyn, who ranks as one of the three of England's
great gardeners of old days, has a kindlier word for them. He is
dilating upon the advantage to the gardener of the high clipped hedge as
a protection for his shrubs and flowers, and goes on to particularise an
oblong square, palisadoed with a hornbeam hedge "in that inexhaustible
magazine at Brompton Park, cultivated by those two industrious
fellow-gardeners, Mr Loudon and Mr Wise." This hedge protects the orange
trees, myrtles, and other rare perennials and exotics from the scorching
rays of the sun; and it equally well shelters the flowers. "Here the
Indian Narcissus, Tuberoses, Japan Lillies, Jasmines, Jonquills,
Periclimena, Roses, Carnations, with all the pride of the parterre,
intermixt between the tree-cases, flowery vases, busts, and statues,
entertain the eye, and breathe their redolent odours and perfumes to the
smell." Clearly there is an advantage in being a gardener if we write
about gardens (provided you are not a mere "landscape-gardener!").
One cannot deny that Horace Walpole did well to expose the absurd
vagaries which were being perpetrated about his time under Dutch
influences. Close alliance with Holland through the House of Orange had
affected every department of horticulture. True, it had enriched our
gardens and conservatories with many rare and beautiful species of
flowers and bulbs, and had imbued the English collector with the
tulip-mania. So far good. But to the same source we trace the reign of
the shears in the English garden, which made Art in a Garden ridiculous,
and gave occasion to the enemy to blaspheme.
"The gardeners about London," says Mr Lambert, writing to the Linnaean
Transactions in 1712, "were remarkable for fine cut greens, and clipt
yews in the shapes of birds, dogs, men, ships, &c. Mr. Parkinson in
Lambeth was much noticed for these things, and he had besides a few
myrtles, oleanders, and evergreens."
"The old order changeth ...
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
And now is Art in a Garden become ridiculous. Since the beginning of
things English gardeners had clipped and trimmed their shrubs; but had
never carried the practice beyond a reasonable extent, and had combined
it with woody and shady effects. With the onset of Dutch influence
country-aspects vanish. Nature is reduced to a prosaic level. The
traditional garden, whose past had been one long series of noble chances
in fine company, now found content as the pedant's darling where it
could have no opening for living romance, but must be tricked out in
stage conventions, and dwindle more and more into a thing of shreds and
patches!
Having arrived at such a pass, it was time that change should come, and
change did come, with a vengeance! But let us not suppose that the
change was from wrong to right. For, indeed, the revolution meant only
that formality gone mad should be supplanted by informality gone equally
mad. And we may note as a significant fact, that the point of departure
is the destruction of the garden's boundaries, and the substitution of
the ha-ha. It was not for the wild improvers to realise how Art that
destroys its own boundaries is certainly doomed to soon have no country
to boast of at all! It proved so in this case. From this moment, the
very thought of garden-ornament was clean put out of mind, and the
grass is carried up to the windows of the great house, as though the
place were nothing better than a farm-shanty in the wilds of
Westmoreland!
But to return to the inauguration of the "landscape-garden." The hour
produced its men in Kent, and "the immortal Brown," as Repton calls him.
Like many another "discovery," theirs was really due to an accident.
Just as it was the closely-corked bottle that popped that gave birth to
champagne, so it was only when our heroes casually leaped the ha-ha that
they had made that they realised that all England outside was one vast
rustic garden, from whence it were a shame to exclude anything!
So began the rage for making all the surroundings of a house assume a
supposed appearance of rude Nature. Levelling, ploughing, stubbing-up,
was the order of the day. The British navvy was in great request--in
fact the day that Kent and Brown discovered England was this worthy's
natal day. Artificial gardens must be demolished as impostures, and
wriggling walks and turf put where they had stood. Avenues must be cut
down or disregarded; the groves, the alleys, the formal beds, the
terraces, the balustrades, the clipt hedges must be swept away as things
intolerable. For the "landscape style" does not countenance a straight
line, or terrace or architectural form, or symmetrical beds about the
house; for to allow these would not be to photograph Nature. As carried
into practice, the style demands that the house shall rise abruptl
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